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Does near field listening render room correction less necessary?

whazzup

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Are there some simple ways of accomplishing this DRC? For example, could I use my RME DAC that is equipped with 5-band equalization in the digital domain, rather than a full blown room correction software? If so, would I need anything other than an SPL meter? Real Time Analyzer (RTA) perhaps? I suspect that I could get some improvements that way, but likely not as effective as full blown.

Personally, I'm rather fond of this simple test tone audio @wwenze did. Reduced to just a few frequencies (compared to a full blown sine sweep), you can easily tell by ear which frequencies are too strong / hums badly in your room. You can do some simple eq with this. Next step up will be a measuring mic and REW.
 

KSTR

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IME, DRC always pays off and the better the circumstances the better the end result will be.
Provided it can work on already pretty clean input data, gentle yet effective DRC will provide an almost textbook-perfect frequency response of magnitude and phase, corresponding to an equally clean step response.

I personally listen "near-field" (0.8m ... 1.2m) with full DRC in a (except for bass region) fairly overdamped medium sized room of 22m², with a tailored target curve to make the speakers sound farther away, no hot treble. The result is excellent but still a bit too dry and therefore I sometimes add a bit of reverb and early reflections to enlarge the soundstage.

The main drawback of listening distances < 2m or so (with or without DRC) is the smaller sweet-spot.
 

QMuse

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The result is excellent but still a bit too dry and therefore I sometimes add a bit of reverb and early reflections to enlarge the soundstage.

Can you plz describe how exactly do you do that?
 

KSTR

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BTW, some 10yrs. ago I had an even more complex setup where I tried to roughly HRTF-encode the reverb and the earlies so that they "fake" the localization cues for a sort of 3D "halo" around and behind the normal straight line between speaker where the soundstage builds upon. The results were very promising (sort of "live" sound character in a small but nice venue) but I lost the whole setup at a point in time and would need to do all from scratch again as I missed to make clear notes of the processing steps. Definitely on the ToDo list, haha...
 

Aerith Gainsborough

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I have a nearfield 2.0 setup in a small living room (Focal Aria 906, around 16.5m²).
DRC is a must for me, there is a rather obnoxious 60Hz mode. Also, DRC extended the frequency response of my speakers down to 36 Hz (I can get away with the bast boost because I do not listen very loud, typically I stay below 90dB @ 1m on peaks).

I use Dirac Live in a DAW on my PC, since the PC is the source of all music anyway.
So far, I don't feel much need for a sub (electronic/organ music excluded).
 

KSTR

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Stereo reproduction is an illusion engine for me, at least for recreational listening. "Ear movie", so to say. Different projection mechanisms and there is no clear line what is "forbidden" and what not. Emulating a larger (and maybe more artifical) room in some sort of semi-aneochic near-field setup seems as viable to me as listening to a large system in a large room with nice acoustics in reality.
It is not easy to dial in just the small just right amount of a short decent reverb and realistic earlies as this also depends on playback level and of course on the recordings. Too much of it and you may end up with a diffuse "underground parking lot" type of soundstage coloration, meh.
But we're getting off-topic...
 
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Matias

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So basically, I just download the REW to a laptop, and follow the help pages within REW, as I adjust the RME? Will the UMIK-1 plug into a laptop via USB? Would I even need to have the RME connected to the computer?
Watch this, it explains it all.

 

Chromatischism

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A bit, but a big room really helps a lot more:) My personal view is that in small rooms it is best to avoid deep bass, and hence the need for equalization.
Ohhh no you didn't

My room: 1430 cu ft

Rythmik G22 Pair Extension.png


I'm the one who convinced John, creator of Room EQ Wizard, to add a new label "Infrasound" to the area under 20 Hz :cool:
 

Chromatischism

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I would never put a 15 inch sub in a small room, and not only because of the physical size. In fact, I might not use a sub at all, depending on how small the room is. I really hate boomy bass, and I would prefer no bass at all to boomy bass.
Fear not - it is possible to get nice, linear bass in small rooms even with powerful subs.
 

Hipper

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Firstly you need to be aware that multi driver speakers require a minimum distance to integrate properly. The designer can tell you what that distance is. In your case it seems to be 30"/80cm.

If you are talking about the distance between my L and R....

No. Distance between the speaker and your ear.
 
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