Audyssey Manual Calibration “OCA’s REW + Audyssey Awesomeness”

[famasfilms]

Not to cast doubt on what you're hearing, but what about Audyssey One would cause this? Maybe OCA could explain.

I vividly recall scores of people over on AVS making these same exact comments after doing speed of sound correction. That tweak is so small as to be inaudible or at best, barely audible. Yet the placebo effect and the expectation bias were strong.

Read my previous post about the hybrid Frankenstein monster amateur attempt to combine an audyssey calibration with a room perfect calibration

Having a script to level match everything rather than doing it myself with a phone, and letting the Denon/audyssey drive the sub is much more preferable than the previous way. Which had the sub on the 1120, roomperfect doesn't have a "lower volume until in the green zone" but a manual that says "leave dial at 12pm". The Denon was set to no sub and large speakers to send all bass to the 1120. I have no idea whether that bass was just the LFE (the .1 info) or all bass/LFE which resulted in "double bass". I also don't know how "level matched" the sub was, esp with the dial at 12pm when on audyssey it's set to 0 and still just above green.

I think it's much simpler to just let the Denon have the sub so that movies .1 is sent directly to the sub. If I listen to music via spotify streaming on the 1120 then I don't need a sub and my Silver 500s certainly go very very low anyway. If I did want to listen to music with a sub then I can stream to the denon and set 2ch playback to use a sub- although presumably this would lose the better 'musicality' of the lyngdorf

So way bigger changes than just a sos correction.


The only remaining question is whether audyssey one on all 7.1.4 speakers is 'better' than having fronts set to L/R bypass and roomperfect enabled on those, but I'm not sure how I could verify that. I'm not a technical guy that can use REW to make graphical comparisons, so for now I'm happy just to put full trust in Audyssey One, which as mentioned, sounds a lot better, more clarity to front speakers, cleaner bass etc.

Just waiting for upstairs neighbour to go out so I can run audyssey for a third time - only because the first two times the 1120 was still configured with a sub connected

 

[TheZebraKilledDarwin]

I vividly recall scores of people over on AVS making these same exact comments after doing speed of sound correction. That tweak is so small as to be inaudible or at best, barely audible. Yet the placebo effect and the expectation bias were strong.

There are a several psychoacoustic phenomena involved and they ar enot all equal. For example our brain is easily compensating different speaker distances when listening in 2.0 or 2.1. It's not necessary to sit exactly between the speakers, to avoid that the image falls apart, or the phantom center collapses, if we sit a few centimers closer to one speaker. Because of that psychoacoustic phenomenon different speaker distance corrections in an AVR for LR are not a necessity. Our brain compensates that. Different values for LR can even confuse our brain and make things worse.

But there are other criteria our brain does not compensate, because in the real world, it needs these tiny differences, to extract information. That happens for example, when an addional speaker to LR, a center comes into play. Then things change dramatically.

Many may have noticed, once LCR speakers are time-corrected perfectly with the help of REW, that we suddenly can hear, if we make the C speaker play later or earlier by only 1 ms. Adding only a 10 cm distance to the center speaker in the receiver setup, can improve dialogue intelligibility substantially, if the same ambience is also present in LR. That's only 0.3 ms. Below the musical timing resolution of human perception.

Our hearing is very sensitive to timing differences in the range of increased or reduced decorrelations.
When it comes to decorrelated signals, like ambiences or the perceived width of stereoized signals, tiny timing differences can have a big impact on the perceived space - the spatial direction, the size, and felt ambience.

Therefore the channel relationship of the speakers, not so much between LR when listening in 2.0 or 2.1, but in a surround setup, the relative timings between the channels is of utmost importance, how convincing the setup works in creating the perception of depth and ambience.

Like with the LCR example: first we need a setup with a correct timing relationship between LCR, before we will be are able to make the slight adjustments in the low centimeter range, for fine tuning. You need a reference to go back and compare to. And that is the timing coherence of all channels torwards the main listening position.
Fine tuning of the decorrelation of all the channels forwards the center and among themselfes is only possible, if we know the correct distances, when all channels are aligned as good as the system technically possible allows.

How convincingly a surround ambience is perceived, is bigly impacted by the (de)correlations among all speaker-channels. And we all have very different speaker distances. One sits closer to the center than to the surrounds, another one has the center further away than the surrounds. False measurement of distances, makes it impossible to achieve a valid channel-timing relationship. And without a valid channel-timing relationship, its not possible to guarantee a minimum surround sound quality level.

 

[Chromatischism]

So way bigger changes than just a sos correction.

Sure, but this is all under the heading of a proper setup. It sounds like you have been over-complicating things

 

[famasfilms]

Sure, but this is all under the heading of a proper setup. It sounds like you have been over-complicating things

A Denon AVR + a stereo amp in ht-bypass mode is a proper setup. The issue, as mentioned, was attempting to combine two different room correction systems. The improvement involved swapping the sub to the other amp, running Aud One and relying solely on that calibration.

Not complicated at all. And I think it's easy to understand why I can hear an improvement

 

[OCA]

Its next iteration, A1 Evo is very close to launch now.

 

[Chromatischism]

How convincingly a surround ambience is perceived, is bigly impacted by the (de)correlations among all speaker-channels. And we all have very different speaker distances. One sits closer to the center than to the surrounds, another one has the center further away than the surrounds. False measurement of distances, makes it impossible to achieve a valid channel-timing relationship.

Of course, but measurements are performed by Audyssey, not One.

So what I'm seeing is that your explanation centers on speaker timings, but if we already had accurate speaker timings, there would be no improvement there. Right?

 

[Chromatischism]

A Denon AVR + a stereo amp in ht-bypass mode is a proper setup. The issue, as mentioned, was attempting to combine two different room correction systems.

Right, I am using a Hypex NCore amp on my front preouts so I wouldn't critique that. What seems to be the issue though is your hybrid setup.

 

[ludovic62310]

Its next iteration, A1 Evo is very close to launch now.

What???????????????????

 

[TheZebraKilledDarwin]

Of course, but measurements are performed by Audyssey, not One.

So what I'm seeing is that your explanation centers on speaker timings, but if we already had accurate speaker timings, there would be no improvement there. Right?

Even without any frequency domain corrections, the quality of the perceived surround field is hugely impacted by the time domain.

The claim was that the false speed of sound factor used by Denon was too small to matter.

The automatic measurements by Audyssey can be avoided, too (this thread is about it).

 

[Chromatischism]

The claim was that the false speed of sound factor used by Denon was too small to matter.

I still believe this to be the case. The flowery subjective language filling forums describing the amazing difference it made is just too good to be true. Then you have others like myself who can't tell the difference.

The automatic measurements by Audyssey can be avoided, too (this thread is about it).

Ahh yes, the manual measurements using REW. Taking full control would certainly give different results than whatever Audyssey is doing (we don't really know since it is not open source). There are a lot of variables to control for if trying to compare 1 for 1, though. My point was OCA's methods could certainly improve on a setup where someone is struggling to get good results, for whatever reason. But if you have a setup that lends well to a smooth Audyssey process where there are no major problems when done and measurements look good, what would the improvements be?

 

[Hyacin]

I've been coding and scripting for the better part of 25 years and created a LOT of stuff that has saved a lot of people a lot of time on various tasks... but this, may be the single most useful and sanity saving thing I've ever created

GitHub - hyacin75/rew-cross-corr-align-automation: Simple and dirty python script to automate the cross correlation alignment step of OCA's Supreme Audyssey Calibration

Simple and dirty python script to automate the cross correlation alignment step of OCA's Supreme Audyssey Calibration - hyacin75/rew-cross-corr-align-automation

github.com

Simple and dirty little python script to do the "click Cross corr align over and over and over and over and over and over [...] until they stop moving, then take a vector average" part of the Supreme Audyssey Calibration. Requires latest beta REW w/ API support like Audyssey One requires.

Hope someone finds it useful! My mouse clicking finger and wrist are already thanking me.

 

[OCA]

I love work of that nature, thanks.

Cross corr align works much better in the newest REW Beta btw.

 

[OCA]

What???????????????????

It premieres in exactly 4 hours!

 

[ViciousAndCruel]

It premieres in exactly 4 hours!

Would a new discussion thread for the new version be worthwhile?

 

[Mike Lima]

I've been coding and scripting for the better part of 25 years and created a LOT of stuff that has saved a lot of people a lot of time on various tasks... but this, may be the single most useful and sanity saving thing I've ever created

GitHub - hyacin75/rew-cross-corr-align-automation: Simple and dirty python script to automate the cross correlation alignment step of OCA's Supreme Audyssey Calibration

Simple and dirty python script to automate the cross correlation alignment step of OCA's Supreme Audyssey Calibration - hyacin75/rew-cross-corr-align-automation

github.com

Simple and dirty little python script to do the "click Cross corr align over and over and over and over and over and over [...] until they stop moving, then take a vector average" part of the Supreme Audyssey Calibration. Requires latest beta REW w/ API support like Audyssey One requires.

Hope someone finds it useful! My mouse clicking finger and wrist are already thanking me.

Can you please teach me how to use it? I have 3 subs and Am struggling.

 

[Hyacin]

Can you please teach me how to use it? I have 3 subs and Am struggling.

The readme on the landing page has all the info you should need. The only key points are your measurement names need to have -[channel] in them, i.e. -SRA, -FWL, -LFE etc., and you need to be running an REW with the API feature. Other than that just install python, run the script, and give it a channel name (SRA, FWL, LFE, etc.) and it will try it's best to 'cross corr align' them. Even with the latest beta and it bumped up to ~1000 attempts in batches of 25 though, I'm still having a hard time aligning all my measurements - to be fair though I didn't strictly stick to the "no more than 20cm away" ... I'm sure if I'd followed the instructions more closely it wouldn't be struggling this bad.

ALL the rest is still manual and a touch confusing, so if the process as a whole is too much, you might be better to do Audyssey One to start.

 

[Peupeut]

Hello @OCA !!

I have downloaded the A1 Evo, it worked perfectly except 1 "small" issue: it did not EQ or leveled my subs... all other channels are ok, but my "SWMIX" channel is few dB below (5db) all the other channels. Filter is empty, I guess because nothing was going above the target.... so SWMIXo and SWMIXfinal are exactly the same curve

(I used the same ady than the one I used for Audyssey One 1.3, and everything was running perfectly)

The second point is: is it normal not to have the target curve on the "All SPL" tab? or is it an issue on my computer?

Nota: did not yet played with the frequency limit of the correction so I did not messed your script!!

 

[Kayshot]

Should I set my MultiEQ Filter Frequency Range back to the 200hz I used to use, and 20hz for the sub?

Or would I want to leave it at full-range correction for this?

 

[OCA]

Hello @OCA !!

I have downloaded the A1 Evo, it worked perfectly except 1 "small" issue: it did not EQ or leveled my subs... all other channels are ok, but my "SWMIX" channel is few dB below (5db) all the other channels. Filter is empty, I guess because nothing was going above the target.... so SWMIXo and SWMIXfinal are exactly the same curve

(I used the same ady than the one I used for Audyssey One 1.3, and everything was running perfectly)

The second point is: is it normal not to have the target curve on the "All SPL" tab? or is it an issue on my computer?

Nota: did not yet played with the frequency limit of the correction so I did not messed your script!!

Update to v1.2 and the low sub volume issue was resolved. You are not expected to see target curve in All SPL.

 

[OCA]

Should I set my MultiEQ Filter Frequency Range back to the 200hz I used to use, and 20hz for the sub?

Or would I want to leave it at full-range correction for this?

Script will reset these settings and do not change them aftewards. The ady files produced after A1 Evo optimization are supposed to be transferred to the receiver as is.