Sure, and Dirac see it the same way: “
Dirac specializes in digital sound optimization solutions. Whether you’re listening to music in your car, relaxing with headphones at home or using your mobile device as a makeshift boombox, audio quality can make or break the experience.”
But they seem to be bringing the room solutions along for the ride. You could say Audy are, too, since they have a small paragraph on room correction at the very bottom of their list of services. But with Dirac the room solutions seem to be active and current, not a footnote.
Hope I’m wrong.
I think it is very difficult to be highly profitable in the REQ business if one focusses on HT and two channel systems. My prediction is that Dirac would eventually follow Audyssey's path, that is, diverse to something more profitable.. If you frequent many audio forums, you would probably agree that very few two channel stereo music enthusiasts have bought in to the auto REQ thing. Most seem to be stuck in believing amps (just one example) are more important for the so called "sound quality", and that for any so called "serious listening", all tone controls should be defeated, let alone EQ of any sort! And if those people also have HT systems, many would stick to direct or pure direct mode anyway, though they may try the EQ thing now and then for some excitement and then would likely settle back to direct mode, their default comfortable zone.
For the average home HT users, most of them are not going to be that picky, many would just go through the auto set up process that recent models kind of force them to. So they just go through the motion and that's it. I wonder how many would bother to tweak with their PCs/Apps, let alone using REW to find out what might have been done to the "sound" on paper.
Imo, D+M is smart sticking with Audyssey and by doing so, they likely are paying much less licensing fees than if they had switched to Dirac. They know who the vast majority of their customers are, and I bet that customer base is much larger than Dirac or AARC equipped AVRs/AVPs, AARC is really only used in Anthem's.