Hi all 
I guess bass boom and room modes have been a headache to most of us. And like most of us, being located in a apartment in a urban area where place is a premium. I didn't have the luxury of placing my speakers in their ideal position, or the permission to install large bass traps.
To add to my woes, my system resides in a small corner in my daughter's bedroom, so aesthetics were important.
Now coming to my story. I have some large pmc 20.26 speakers in a not so ideal 12x15 foot room. They have otherwise amazing bass as they are a transmission line design. However in this room, the bass used to over power everything else. I realised long time ago, that taming the bass a priority, before even considering upgrading any thing else. As all I could ever hear was only the booming bass.
So I tried measuring my room with REW, but quickly got lost in all the graphs . So decided that being dumb as Iam, I needed a automated bass correction system, with some manual intervention if required, after the automated correction.
My research led me to a lot of options, the cheapest of which seemed to be the Dspeaker antimode 2.0. This small nifty device is a Swiss army knife, with a bass correction system, an inbuilt dac, analogue to analogue bass correction, and even a preamp section to directly drive power amps. However, what really caught my eye was its ability to take a usb or optical feed and correct it in real time, and output via optical out to a dac of ones choice.
This is how Iam presently using it. I have a CCA feeding it via digital in, and the digital out goes to my dac. I had to place the supplied microphone in my listening position, and read the manual for 15 mins to under stand the process, and once I got started. It shot out 7 very long blasts of sound to measure my rooms bass response and show me a before and after graph of the room response. The after was mighty pleasing, as you can see the graph in the picture below.
Upon my first listen, I was stunned at the day and night difference it made in the sound. Gone was the bass boom, there is suddenly so much new texture in the bass, the mid range clarity has increase tremendously, and treble has become much clearer.
Just thought I'd share my experiences with it, just incase someone is looking for a automated bass correction system like me. If interested please Google it, as it has lot more inputs and outputs and lot more functionality than I can write about. But please bear in mind that this is primarily a bass correction system, that can only correct upto a Max of 500hz. Though I found best results correcting only upto 300hz. That is where I felt the corrected bass , felt connected with the mid range. Even after the correction, I have option to modify the corrected curve with my own house curve, though I didn't find a need to do it. It was so good straight out of the box. And for correction above 500hz, it only has PEQ with 14 custom points, which I didn't bother with.
Though in the long term, the Dspeaker antimode will be shifted to correct via analogue preamp in to analogue preamp out, to just feed the corrected bass signal to the power amps driving only my bass drivers in my 3 way active triamped system.
PS : Please note that dirac live 2.0 is a Better option if one wants full range correction. As it also does to the bass what the DSpeaker antimode does. Maybe I will try it in the future, if I can read around to under stand it enough. But for the time being, the Dspeaker is worth it's weight in gold. I guess I've spent more on stupid cables, which absolutely didn't do a fraction of what the Dspeaker did in my room. Iam so happy, Iam already contemplating ordering some absorption panels from a site called www.technoacoustuc.in as they have designer customisable panels, that my wife or daughter shouldn't complain about, as long as I have their pics imprinted on them
Edit : The red curve in the below curve is uncorrected bass response. The black curve is the corrected bass response. As you can see there is still a deep dip at 75hz that I did not wish to correct as it is room induced. I did not want to blow my tube amps pouring too much power trying to correct it. The Dspeaker gives us th is option to either try to correct these dips or not. Ideally I should either change my speaker position or my listening position to correct it. However both are sadly not possible. So once I get my class D high power amps for the bass driver, I will attempt to see if the extra power can help to some extent. Though it might also proove to be impossible.
All the best. And thanks for reading my long rant
Specifications page for better clarity
I guess bass boom and room modes have been a headache to most of us. And like most of us, being located in a apartment in a urban area where place is a premium. I didn't have the luxury of placing my speakers in their ideal position, or the permission to install large bass traps.
To add to my woes, my system resides in a small corner in my daughter's bedroom, so aesthetics were important.
Now coming to my story. I have some large pmc 20.26 speakers in a not so ideal 12x15 foot room. They have otherwise amazing bass as they are a transmission line design. However in this room, the bass used to over power everything else. I realised long time ago, that taming the bass a priority, before even considering upgrading any thing else. As all I could ever hear was only the booming bass.
So I tried measuring my room with REW, but quickly got lost in all the graphs . So decided that being dumb as Iam, I needed a automated bass correction system, with some manual intervention if required, after the automated correction.
My research led me to a lot of options, the cheapest of which seemed to be the Dspeaker antimode 2.0. This small nifty device is a Swiss army knife, with a bass correction system, an inbuilt dac, analogue to analogue bass correction, and even a preamp section to directly drive power amps. However, what really caught my eye was its ability to take a usb or optical feed and correct it in real time, and output via optical out to a dac of ones choice.
This is how Iam presently using it. I have a CCA feeding it via digital in, and the digital out goes to my dac. I had to place the supplied microphone in my listening position, and read the manual for 15 mins to under stand the process, and once I got started. It shot out 7 very long blasts of sound to measure my rooms bass response and show me a before and after graph of the room response. The after was mighty pleasing, as you can see the graph in the picture below.
Upon my first listen, I was stunned at the day and night difference it made in the sound. Gone was the bass boom, there is suddenly so much new texture in the bass, the mid range clarity has increase tremendously, and treble has become much clearer.
Just thought I'd share my experiences with it, just incase someone is looking for a automated bass correction system like me. If interested please Google it, as it has lot more inputs and outputs and lot more functionality than I can write about. But please bear in mind that this is primarily a bass correction system, that can only correct upto a Max of 500hz. Though I found best results correcting only upto 300hz. That is where I felt the corrected bass , felt connected with the mid range. Even after the correction, I have option to modify the corrected curve with my own house curve, though I didn't find a need to do it. It was so good straight out of the box. And for correction above 500hz, it only has PEQ with 14 custom points, which I didn't bother with.
Though in the long term, the Dspeaker antimode will be shifted to correct via analogue preamp in to analogue preamp out, to just feed the corrected bass signal to the power amps driving only my bass drivers in my 3 way active triamped system.
PS : Please note that dirac live 2.0 is a Better option if one wants full range correction. As it also does to the bass what the DSpeaker antimode does. Maybe I will try it in the future, if I can read around to under stand it enough. But for the time being, the Dspeaker is worth it's weight in gold. I guess I've spent more on stupid cables, which absolutely didn't do a fraction of what the Dspeaker did in my room. Iam so happy, Iam already contemplating ordering some absorption panels from a site called www.technoacoustuc.in as they have designer customisable panels, that my wife or daughter shouldn't complain about, as long as I have their pics imprinted on them
Edit : The red curve in the below curve is uncorrected bass response. The black curve is the corrected bass response. As you can see there is still a deep dip at 75hz that I did not wish to correct as it is room induced. I did not want to blow my tube amps pouring too much power trying to correct it. The Dspeaker gives us th is option to either try to correct these dips or not. Ideally I should either change my speaker position or my listening position to correct it. However both are sadly not possible. So once I get my class D high power amps for the bass driver, I will attempt to see if the extra power can help to some extent. Though it might also proove to be impossible.
All the best. And thanks for reading my long rant
Specifications page for better clarity
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