But it’s much more fun to spend crazy money on magic rocks and snake oil that make your rich audiophile friends want their own magic rocks.
The problems are multiple;
1. When you move out of the sweet spot to listen anywhere else in the room, the music becomes distorted because you can are now hearing an EQ curve that is compensating for the sweet spot, but has nothing to do with the frequency response in the other listening positions.
2. These automatic systems tend to apply dozens of small EQ bands to the output, which smears the phase relationships of the record and dulls transient response. The feeling is of the record being mushy and dull.
3. These systems cannot account for time-domain ringing issues in the listening room. So a corrective EQ boost to compensate for a dip in the sweet spot will become a loud ringing at that frequency elsewhere in the room.
4. Corrective EQ cannot compensate for the deepest frequency nulls, no matter how much of a compensatory boost you make. A heavy handed boost to compensate this way will cause massive ringing elsewhere in the room.
I could go on.
These automatic room correction devices cause far more problems than they solve. There are ways to apply some EQ correction, but you will get 10x larger returns on performance by addressing acoustic issues introduced by the room, rather than trying to compensate on the speaker outputs.
Source: I design and build high-end recording studios for working audio professionals and tune speaker rigs for Grammy-winning artists.
Granted, the space is not easy for people to intuit on their own. It opens the door to a lot of terrible ideas that get propogated by people who don't know any better.
Source: I design and build high-end recording studios for audio professionals.
You realize that the pitch for this is basically the same as the pitch for magic pebbles? It's a cure-all box you put on the wire to make things sound better, for a low price of $1,500 or something like that.
I know enough about signal processing to know that magic pebbles probably work worse, but I can think of many reasons why it might not produce the audio you subjectively like better. I suspect it can't really even correct for many of the real-world issues you might have, because equalization doesn't fix echoes, resonance, etc.
In any case, it's a bit of a strawman, because most audiophiles are not buying pebbles in the first place. They're trying vacuum tubes instead of ICs, or are trying out different op-amps, or stuff like that.