Active Room Treatment (ART) by Dirac

[Oddball]

As you see above it suddenly decided to work

One more thing, we with Marantz have never or rarely seen any numbers on how many filters that are used
Supposedly a low amount did not show, now with atmos i see a nr for the first time - 74 out of 98 used

From another forum I learned that filters will not show in the lower channel count system (like 5.x.4) as ART will be able to cross support all groups (assumes grupes of 2). Once you are over the channel count that can be cross supported, Dirac will start showing the filter count. Not sure if true but makes some sense. Although still confusing - why just not show the filters in every case and be done with it.

 

[Oddball]

View attachment 504814

Corrected:
View attachment 504815

Yeah - these are looking pretty good and probably in a good room. I am getting a band of 5dB after ART passes on to Dirac Live. Primarily a courtesy of a fine room .

 

[JRowland]

why just not show the filters in every case and be done with it.

Because it doesn’t matter so why waste the energy. I don’t care if I don’t need to care if that makes sense. If I needed to care it is a useful tool to help someone figure out what gets left behind. In my set up I can do whatever combination I want so no need for me to care about the cutting floor.

 

[EngineerNate]

Yeah - these are looking pretty good and probably in a good room. I am getting a band of 5dB after ART passes on to Dirac Live. Primarily a courtesy of a fine room .

The room doesn’t have much in the way of treatment in-room (rugs mainly), but the walls are all 5/8” moisture resistant drywall (thicker paper, denser gypsum) and stuffed with rockwool and backed with foam board.

 

[Oddball]

The room doesn’t have much in the way of treatment in-room (rugs mainly), but the walls are all 5/8” moisture resistant drywall (thicker paper, denser gypsum) and stuffed with rockwool and backed with foam board.

It sure measures well and probably sounds pretty good. I don't have a "room" per se - it is multi functional open space that is very irregularly shaped. But still sounds solid and is all I have for the time being.

 

[EngineerNate]

I think I mostly got lucky, it’s my ht room/my kid’s play room

 

[Oddball]

Because it doesn’t matter so why waste the energy. I don’t care if I don’t need to care if that makes sense. If I needed to care it is a useful tool to help someone figure out what gets left behind. In my set up I can do whatever combination I want so no need for me to care about the cutting floor.

I get the point and can't say I disagree. But without explicit explanation it took us a while and lots of posts across the forums to figure it out. So lots of wasted energy right there.

 

[middlemarch]

Does anyone have a clue as to why there are different max filter counts? I've seen 98, 96, 94, and in my case 92 (on an A1H). Is there some background process or configuration parameter that can render some filters invisible?

 

[smygolf]

While i am on it, is it possible to upscale multi ch Pcm so atmos kicks in ?
I do not get any output but receiver says atmos speakers are active

 

[JRowland]

I get the point and can't say I disagree. But without explicit explanation it took us a while and lots of posts across the forums to figure it out. So lots of wasted energy right there.

I didn’t waste much, I knew the answer right away and said so

 

[ban25]

While i am on it, is it possible to upscale multi ch Pcm so atmos kicks in ?
I do not get any output but receiver says atmos speakers are active

If you want to activate your height channels with say a 5.1 PCM source, try the AURO-3D or DTS Neural:X upscalers. AURO-3D should copy the bed layer into the heights, attenuated by several dB so as to moderate the effect. Neural:X is more aggressive, but this sometimes leads to sounds in weird places. Dolby Surround Upmixer (DSU) tends to do less with the heights than either of the other two, which is just as well for me.

Upmixing is not a magic bullet. There's no height metadata in the source, so the algorithm is simply routing based on whether sound is correlated or frequency range, or some other metric.

 

[seashell]

I heard back from Dirac regarding my subs not being used as support in their default setup. After sending them the dirac project file the response was basically your measurements and levels look great, odd the subs weren't chosen as support and adding the subs in manually was the right thing to do.

 

[smygolf]

If you want to activate your height channels with say a 5.1 PCM source, try the AURO-3D or DTS Neural:X upscalers. AURO-3D should copy the bed layer into the heights, attenuated by several dB so as to moderate the effect. Neural:X is more aggressive, but this sometimes leads to sounds in weird places. Dolby Surround Upmixer (DSU) tends to do less with the heights than either of the other two, which is just as well for me.

Upmixing is not a magic bullet. There's no height metadata in the source, so the algorithm is simply routing based on whether sound is correlated or frequency range, or some other metric.

With pcm i do not get those options, only with bitstream.
I use a NUC and has a bunch of movies on it and i use VLC player.
Win10 and atmos are on in the sound setting, have tried without with no change

Gonna do some more testing tomorrow, i qould survive without it but it would be fun to test.

Thanks for the replay

 

[OCA]

FYI I don’t think infra-bass ever being filtered in a future update as it comes down to the 50 ms total delay limit of the receiver DSP chip. ART relies on firing the support speakers up to 50 ms ahead of the main speaker to generate those time-inverted excess phase corrections without introducing any pre-ringing. But 50 ms is 0.05 s, which corresponds to 20 Hz. Without a longer allowable delay, there’s simply no way to correct anything lower using this approach. And realistically, that 50 ms ceiling isn’t going anywhere: these processors need to buffer 50 ms of 8K video just to keep audio and video in sync.

 

[JRowland]

FYI I don’t think infra-bass ever being filtered in a future update as it comes down to the 50 ms total delay limit of the receiver DSP chip. ART relies on firing the support speakers up to 50 ms ahead of the main speaker to generate those time-inverted excess phase corrections without introducing any pre-ringing. But 50 ms is 0.05 s, which corresponds to 20 Hz. Without a longer allowable delay, there’s simply no way to correct anything lower using this approach. And realistically, that 50 ms ceiling isn’t going anywhere: these processors need to buffer 50 ms of 8K video just to keep audio and video in sync.

Thanks for confirming my thoughts on that, Joss had mentioned the limitations of how far Dirac can “look into the future” to make corrections and I read between the lines but wasn’t sure the science/math equated to 20Hz.

ETA: do you think better processing power (in potential future processors) will solve this?

 

[OCA]

Thanks for confirming my thoughts on that, Joss had mentioned the limitations of how far Dirac can “look into the future” to make corrections and I read between the lines but wasn’t sure the science/math equated to 20Hz.

Sure thing. I know it was not a timely post but I was working on it and it just popped up my mind and wanted to share with the community.

 

[JRowland]

Sure thing. I know it was not a timely post but I was working on it and it just popped up my mind and wanted to share with the community.

I can’t control it so I don’t care but thank you. I ninja edited in a question to you about future potential.

 

[OCA]

Thanks for confirming my thoughts on that, Joss had mentioned the limitations of how far Dirac can “look into the future” to make corrections and I read between the lines but wasn’t sure the science/math equated to 20Hz.

ETA: do you think better processing power (in potential future processors) will solve this?

Memory is cheap these days, so I guess they could do it if they wanted to. I had started to think this was a dying hobby, with gen Z showing little interest in anything other than headphones. But since people have largely stopped going to movie theaters and home streaming has become the norm, maybe sales have started to grow again and companies have started paying attention to the sector once again. I was quite surprised to see miniDSP come up with an Atmos device last week for example. In the past, for many decades, we used to get better and better devices every few years.

 

[EWL5]

FYI I don’t think infra-bass ever being filtered in a future update as it comes down to the 50 ms total delay limit of the receiver DSP chip. ART relies on firing the support speakers up to 50 ms ahead of the main speaker to generate those time-inverted excess phase corrections without introducing any pre-ringing. But 50 ms is 0.05 s, which corresponds to 20 Hz. Without a longer allowable delay, there’s simply no way to correct anything lower using this approach. And realistically, that 50 ms ceiling isn’t going anywhere: these processors need to buffer 50 ms of 8K video just to keep audio and video in sync.

Wouldn’t 50 ms be 0.005 s?

 

[middlemarch]

That's 5ms. 1000ms =1 sec