Frequency response is everything!?...

[Tim Link]

As an acoustical engineer, I would argue that relative phase is a more important measurement over frequency response. Both acoustical and electrical phase anomalies are more perceptual to sound quality attributes, effecting amplitude, spatiality, and timbre. Fairly poor frequency response can sound good or bad, but poor relative phase never sounds good.

What counts as a phase anomaly? Does the phase have to be perfectly flat, or just relatively smooth, free from abrupt shifts?

 

[schlager]

What counts as a phase anomaly?

If you can see changes in the group delay, then you have phase anomaly. If it is a minimum phase issue, you can fix both amplitude and time domain, as they are linked.


Large phase rotation or abrupt phase shift in the midrange (300-3000 Hz) affects the depth and the stability of the soundstage/image and degrade the overall clarity of the sound.

This is where the best DRC programs excel as they uses both peak, group delay and phase to synchronize the speakers and speaker drivers. It is relatively easy to achieve this synchronization when operating with group delay correction. Then you get an almost constant delay and linear phase and it is "just" to ensure that the corrected drivers peak at the same time. The effect is quite dramatic and can't be had in the analog world.

Fixing the time domain issues does improve the overall sound quality, but I would still argue that fixing the frequency response is paramount.

 

[iansr]

I can recommend DRC Designer, it's free and run on most convolver engines. DRC Designer is build from the same cloth as Audiolense and Acourate and is very powerful. I tried to do FIR filter in REW and Rephase, but DRC Designer beats it every day and it is a much faster process to generate different filters to compare. Recommended.

Digital Room Correction Designer Help

Can i ask, how knowledgeable do you need to be in order to get good results with DRC Designer? I have some knowledge of the acoustical theories applying to speakers but there is a lot more that I don’t know !

Actually forget that question as I have just read the the Guide and it doesn’t do crossover filters which is my primary concern. Back to plan A; AudioLense.

 

[schlager]

Correct, no x-over in DRC.

 

[iansr]

Thanks for the confirmation. Have you used AudioLense schlager ?