altought i do think room EQ and speakers are by far the biggest game changers in room for sound
Definitely think so.
1. Compared to many years ago, we now have a lot more information, on speakers, to aid with a purchase decision.
2. DSP has contributed to lowering the cost of speakers, to achieve what would otherwise have needed expensive physical/electronic engineering as you would find in something like zero DSP speakers such as made by PSI.
3. DSP enabled speakers, have made it easier to add on user controls to EQ, within the speaker.
4. DSP outside of the speaker, aks DRC (Digital Room Correction - which should correct some of the speaker anomalies as well as room anomalies) seems to have evolved quite a lot in recent years, as a tool to take things one level further to address any remaining non linearities, in the speaker, as well as counteract the effects of the room. The challenge with this DSP typically done outside the speaker is, I have not seen any proper comparison of the various approaches, at the budget end, e.g IK Multimedia ARC vs Sonarworks vs Acourate vs Audiolense vs the various options that can be achieved via payware tools like REW + RePhase. And on that latter end, there is so much being published by individuals, on blogs or Youtube, but a bit difficult to get one's head around what each person is doing, and what the differences between their approaches are. REW and Rephase and similar tools have tons of options/parameters, so it does get pretty confusing........So much of what occurs in these tools is proprietary, some of it a bit voodoo, and without any real proper scientific confirmation.
Without real comparisons, especially when for most of these tools - the measurement microphone + software (and sometimes an external processor based standalone DSP unit, such as from MiniDSP), comes out at about £400 to £500 as the cost of entry. And you have to spend that much as a guinea pig, not knowing really how effective the results will be, compared with any other method.
From anecdotes Trinnov seems to be highly effective - for those with very hefty budgets.
Hopefully the next few months we'll see much more comparative information, for now most of the info is from the manufacturers of each solution or implementors who are singing praises - and earn a fee for implementation. No real world product comparisons. Might be that these speaker DSP/DRC manufacturers are too afraid to submit their products for a truly independent comparison, lest the truth be revealed, that its all hype without substance!!.
