Comment by scarecrowbob | Hacker News Reader

Comment by scarecrowbob | Hacker News Reader

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I think your project is quite cool.

I'm very skeptical about treating acoustic issues using eq.

Since you're into this kind of thing, I will share an experince I had. For a couple of years, I used to do various kinds of audio production work. One thing that I was always curious about was the way acoustics work in the room.

So I started getting a signal generator and just sending that through the system. I'd send out an 80hz sine wave, and walk the room, and then 90hz, and same. If you do this, you'll get a lot of interesting results as you hear the room nodes, both additive and subtractive.

It's even more interesting when you're in a very reflective and "regularly" shaped room. But you will still find nodes (likely) in any space.

It's a fun experiment, IMO, because you really get an idea of how big these are.

You also get a much better idea of how hard a problem it is to solve, because they aren't all at the same places in a room for different frequencies. So room correction eq has a lot to do with where your measurement mic is placed, but even 1-2M away from that mic can have very different results.

The most interesting thing to me was when I did this process in a specific room (a studio control room) and started to try to treat specific modalities that seemed worse than others. As I went through this process and added physical treatment (in this case mostly fiberglass batting at specific locations), the nodes started to diminish.

At that point, even my very inexpensive Event near field monitors were very clear and easy to make mix decisions on.

Well, I'm not really an expert, but room correction seems like an imperfect solution to an annoying problem in situations where you don't feel so crafty. I'd agree that obsessive room treatment is the way to go if you can plan a space for audio with the time, resources and dedication needed.

It obviously makes sense to turn room correction on and off and check the difference over the range of seating being used in any given situation. Do no harm, etc.

The run-ins I've had with room correction, with my own cheap hi-fi gear, as well as the and higher end stuff my cool friends have, indicate that room correction can be very handy.

Even the room correction built into the 2018-model EUR 400 Yamaha amp I have at home does more good than harm, with the little Genelec sub and Polk satellites. That is, in a regular residential setting, where everything doesn't happen on the terms of audio reproduction, to put it politely towards other concerned parties.

Similarly, this cottage thing revolves around my synesthetic friend's family owning and keeping up the place in a multi-generational social dance of compromise, which this very stylish friend finds annoying and moderately embarrassing.

There's not exactly the tasteful minimalist decor my friend would prefer, but a type of deliberately shabby, cartoonishly frugal kitsch you'd typically find in Finnish summer homes, where people just want to feel freed of suburban respectability norms. More to the point, my friend's mom wouldn't take kindly to acoustic treatment interfering with her live-laugh-love game.

I on the other hand have done the political hand wringing required to have my living room seating arranged for audio in the small apartment I share with my SO. And the sub is placed behind my couch where there happens to be a sharp, little corner that nicely traps bass resonance elsewhere than the couch, so DSP makes smaller adjustments.

Likewise, my Yamaha amp's room correction saved me that hour-or-so of annoyance of flipping DIP switches back and forth on the bottom of the Genelec sub to manually listen for the correct phase setting, or whatever it's called.

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