My DIY Multi-Speaker / Multi-Sub auto optimizer

[dziemian]

Measurements Software: https://www.rationalacoustics.com/pages/about-smaart

Room Mode Calculator: https://www.vesalaasanen.com/

'Room simulator for non-shoebox rooms'
https://www.audiosciencereview.com/...s/room-simulator-for-non-shoebox-rooms.69609/

Thank you. Anything else apart from Rew and t-smaart? What about decay time and sti analysis? Btw your measurements looks great. I have seen your post on Dirac Art and I wonder as anybody here whatcwould be the comparison

 

[dziemian]

What smaart version is good enough? The pricing is broad.

 

[umamiaudio]

Hi, I just tested UA Perfect Soup with a 9.8.6 Atmos System. I never heard my room as cohesive and clear. Bass was precise and tight. Below you will find my before and after measurements. I plan to add a hardware block diagram soon.

System Calibrated:
View attachment 533066

System Uncalibrated:
View attachment 533067

System Calibrated with LFE:
View attachment 533068

System uncalibrated with subs:
View attachment 533069

Room Layout:
View attachment 533071

Left Front speaker Calibrated Decay Time:
View attachment 533072

LFE subs calibrated Decay Time:
View attachment 533073

Speech Transmission Index (STI) Analysis:
View attachment 533074

Umami Audio VST Plugin:
View attachment 533075

I want to mention thought that these measurements were done from a calibration with LESS measurement points than normally required, so we can expect an even better result when done properly.

 

[Stingber09]

What smaart version is good enough? The pricing is broad.

That depends on your needs. REW is free and good to begin with as you get familiar with the measurements.

 

[dziemian]

I used to measure with REW a couple of years ago. Before a child happened

 

[anlin]

After running Dirac Live + Bass Control (DLBC) as a VST with my 5.2.2 system for the past three years, I decided to give Umami’s Perfect Soup a try since my existing signal chain was already compatible. Here are my initial impressions and brief comparative measurements

System

• Speakers
  • Mains: Genelec 8361A x3
  • Surrounds: Genelec 4030C x2
  • Front heights: Genelec 8020A x2
  • Subs: custom 21" LLT x2
• Processing/amplification
  • AVR: Yamaha RX-V781
  • Sub amp: Yamaha PC-412D
  • Conversion: Lynx Aurora16 + LT-Dante
  • DSP: server with an Intel i3-13100 and a Dante PCIe interface, running Windows 10 (soft-realtime tuned)
• Measurement gear
  • Microphone: Beyerdynamic MM 1
  • Preamplifier/phantom power: Rolls MP13

Signal chain

                                               |----[Dante]--> PC412D/subs
                                               |        
AVR --[analog 5.1.2]--> Aurora16 --[Dante]--> DSP --[Dante]--> Aurora16 --[AES]--> L/C/R
                                                                  |
                                                                  |--[Analog]--> LS,RS,LFH,RFH

Listening space
5 x 2.5 x 3.5 m (WxHxD). Some furniture but no specific acoustic treatment

Measurements
(Stereo only for now due to software and time limitations)

L+R only, no correction

L+R, DLBC

L+R (+ supports), Perfect soup

L+R only, no correction

L+R, DLBC

L+R (+ supports), Perfect soup

Subjective evaluation
DLBC and PS both do a good job of taming the worst room modes, but overall PS sounds better in my subjective opinion. I'll spare you the audiophile nonsense

Notes

• PS's latency is low at 10 ms
• The VST runs well with minimal buffers (64 samples @ 96K)
• The calibration process is time consuming, but the results speak for themselves. I ended up doing 30 MLP measurements with 12 secondary listening position measurements
• It's nice to be able to adjust the target curve without having to redo the calibration like with DLBC
• The support is outstanding. A VST channel mapping bug took less than a day to resolve

Conclusion
With my setup the Perfect Soup delivers superior results both subjectively and objectively. I intend to keep running it as my main room correction software for the foreseeable future. I recommend giving it a try if your hardware can run it.

 

[StabMe]

@umamiaudio

Since my system is fully active and i do crossovers and room correction inside Reaper, there is no way i can run calibration of Perfect Soup using microphone and my system using direct access via ASIO, since one can only access separate "ways" (e.g. subs, woofers, tweeters) directly via ASIO. Developer said that using workarounds like creating virtual ASIO devices is a bad idea due to possible drift issues so i decided to try a different workaround.

I ran calibration by exposing 2 subwoofers and 2 woofers directly in Calibration Wizard with the hopes that Perfect Soup will take care of the low end part and i will then add tweeters in Reaper, cross them over to calibration woofers+subs, time align them and then add crude (or maybe not so crude) correction of the resulting response using MMM or maybe more sophisticated methods.

So calibration went with no errors, 30 measurements were recorded an i then got my calibration available. I was planning to start messing with adding tweeters but then i decided to run a quic sweep measurement with REW and the response was not very flat (very ragged).

In order to setup routing of inputs/outputs for the Perfect Soup plugin, i send stereo signal to the input and set up the plugin to have 4 outputs and routing was similar to that which was used during calibration: first two output channels are woofers and third and fourth channels are subs.

Could i be getting very ragged response due to trying to calibrate basically a tweeterless system?

 

[umamiaudio]

It's not designed to manage crossovers within the same speaker. That needs a different set of assumptions than the one Perfect Soup was designed on. In this case I think (I'm pretty sure but not 100% sure) a virtual ASIO device would be okay because it's still the same physical device. Also several people had good results using two devices anyway even though it's unsupported and there's currently nothing to mitigate a drift (if any). You can also use loopback as well if your interface has enough channels. In this case I would try both calibrating as a 2.0 system and a 2.2 system where the tweeter and woofers make a 2 way bookshelf + subs.

7 , 8 ==> loopback into reaper x-over===> 1 , 2 ==> tweeters
                                          3 , 4 ==> mids
                                          5 , 6 ==> Subs
OR

7 , 8 ==> loopback into reaper x-over ===> 1 , 2 ==> tweeters
                                           3 , 4 ==> mids
9 , 10 ==> loopback into reaper =========> 5 , 6 ==> Subs

The next big release will come with drift timing correction as well as support to allow different input and output devices.

 

[john61ct]

Please do BNC word clocking rather than slaving to an input signal

ASRC buffering as a last resort, only if things go wrong with hardware clocking

 

[umamiaudio]

A result from a user on discord.

 

[umamiaudio]

Please do BNC word clocking rather than slaving to an input signal

ASRC buffering as a last resort, only if things go wrong with hardware clocking

BNC fixes drift but doesn't fix driver initialization time so a loopback of some sort is still needed.