Learn How this room was tuned

Room correction

How the system was measured across the whole sofa and how Dirac Live corrects its tone and timing, with Dirac’s own demo to listen to.

miniDSP Flex Digital with Dirac Live

Measured across the whole sofa, then tuned to it.

Every room changes how a speaker sounds: its size and shape, the sofa, exactly where each speaker stands. Dirac even sells software that stands in for acoustic panels; this room has the real thing, the AVAAs and the panels. What they leave, Dirac Live corrects in the signal, running on the Flex between the sources and the speakers.

We tuned it with a , the measurement microphone Dirac itself suggests, at positions around the sofa, laid out the way Dirac does it for a sofa of listeners: first at the centre, at ear height, then at the corners of two boxes, one around each half of the sofa. From all of them it builds one correction for everyone sitting there, not for a single seat in the middle.

Most room correction only evens out the tone, cutting the peaks and filling the dips. Dirac Live corrects timing too. Its time alignment lines up the speakers and subwoofers so they work as one, and where the room’s reflections smear a sharp sound such as a drumbeat, it tightens it back up. By Dirac’s account you hear a more focused stereo image, cleaner attack and tighter bass: in its words, “audio that sounds like the creator intended.”

Measured from
positions, across the sofa
Corrects
Frequency response and timing
Dirac licence

Dirac Live on Dirac’s site

The sofa seen from the speakers, drawn to scale, with two people sitting on it and the microphone positions ticked off one by one: the centre first, then the corners of two boxes, one around each person. Side view of the room, drawn to scale: a speaker on its stand by the front wall firing straight at the ears of someone on the sofa, the side table, and the positions above and below ear height.
Drawn to scale: the sofa as the speakers see it, then the room from the side, with the front wall on the left. Each dot is a microphone position, the larger one first; further ones sit a little higher and to the side. The plots are illustrations, not measurements of this room. The frequency response is worked out from the room’s layout and shown as Dirac Live’s own screen shows it: the left speaker with the subwoofers, averaged over every microphone position. The pale line is the target, and the solid line is the result, which follows the switch: on, it meets the target but for a few narrow dips, which Dirac does not fill because they move from seat to seat. The shaded strip at the far left lies below the licence’s range, where nothing is corrected.

The demo is Dirac’s own, and its sound follows the same switch. Off, the track plays through the recorded response of an untreated room; on, it plays clean, which is what correction aims for. It was not recorded in this room, and headphones hear it best. Audio: Dirac.