cliveb wrote: > Many years ago I asked on rec.audio.pro about DRC. I was especially > interested in using it to try and flatten the fairly modest bass dips & > humps in my room. The response I got - from quite a few experienced > professional sound engineers whose opinion I trust - is that DRC simply > does not work. Their view was that the only way to fix bass response > issues is with proper room treatment - bass traps and the like. But on > these forums I see a number of people swearing by the effectiveness of > DRC - especially in the bass region. > > Would anyone care to offer some thoughts on these two differing > opinions? How can they be reconciled?
Well, speaking as a former sound engineer, and with a degree in Electroacoustics (although it was a long time ago!)... I would imagine that "many years ago", room correction technology was in ts infancy, and there simply wasn't the hardware available to do it properly. My final year project at University was "Digital Filtering", and I remember that one of my biggest frustrations was that I couldn't implement anything in real-time because of lack of hardware. It was possible to get DSP boards, but they were frighteningly expensive, and required programming in C. I remember some of the research guys in the lab working on using Maximum Length Sequences [1] to measure impluse responses [2]. That sort of stuff requires processing power that simply wasn't available in the late 80s/early 90s. I would tend to agree that wildly inaccurate rooms will need physical treatment to sort them out but, assuming you have a room that is reasonably well-behaved, I have found that DRC seems to work very well. For completeness, my setup is: Transporter Behringer DEQ2496 in FX loop of Transporter (using fw40) Rotel RC-870BX pre Rotel RB-850 power B&W DM610 speakers My room is approx 6m x 4m, with a low (2.1m) ceiling. Speakers are not optimally positioned (inches from the wall) and the rest of the room is full of junk (it's my home office, and I'm v. untidy!) R. 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximum_length_sequence 2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impulse_response _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
