Room Equalization
Room Equalization
Tired of moving your speakers and furniture around to optimize your listening experience? We can help with that!
For many audiophiles, getting the ‘perfect sound’ is one of the biggest challenges to overcome. One of the biggest sources of distortion in the audio transmission chain is actually not in the electronic components, but in the loudspeakers and the listening room. Even modern loudspeaker systems are far from being linear. Reflections, resonances and irregular dampening of sound waves in a listening room can have a great influence.
Since it is often not practical to set up a separate listening room which is perfectly dampened and designed to avoid resonances, room equalization is a tool to correct some of these distortions. That equipment has always been costly to purchase and complicated to use. Until now.
Our
helps simplify the room correction process in a way that is easy and affordable.
Here’s the basic premise:
The process begins by identifying deficiencies in the room and its furnishings. To do this, the frequency response of the loudspeakers and the various influences of the room can measured by playing back a test signal, e.g. a white noise, pink noise or a sine sweep, and measuring it with a measuring microphone at the listening position. From this test, the frequency response of the complete audio chain, including the transmission through the room, can be calculated.
To equalize this room response, a filter with a frequency response inverse of the measured one can be placed in the audio playback chain. Ideally, this would completely equalize all room effects and would result in a flat frequency response at the listing position.
Unfortunately there are different limitations in doing this: It might not be possible to find a perfectly fitting filter, but one which matches roughly should be possible. Further, this correction works only for the measured place, a half meter beside it this the filter would not work as good anymore. Therefore it is not possible to have everywhere in the room a perfect linear frequency response, but it is possible to correct the most extreme distortions and room modes.
To measure the frequency response and to calculate the filter, you would need a good measurement microphone, ideally a calibrated one. A popular and free software which exists for multiple platforms is Room EQ Wizard. [tutorial how to measure and create filter coefficients?]
The filter coefficients calculated like this can then be used in the DSP to filter all audio signals played back through it…