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speaker correction

Why do great speakers sometimes sound bad?

A well-calibrated Panasonic TC-PVT50 TV will look exactly the same in almost any room with the lights turned down. Video performance is reliable and predictable, but audio is the exact opposite. Speakers will sound very different in different rooms, sometimes to a frightening degree. AV receivers' speaker calibration systems might help a little bit, but they can never eliminate the problems created by sound reflecting off a room's walls, floor and ceiling. The size and shape of the room, furniture, floor covering, mirrors, windows, and drapes all play their parts in the sound environment.

When I was a hi-fi … Read more

DEQX advances the art of speaker correction

I've listened to a lot of speakers over the past thirty-odd years, and I can tell you this, they're all imperfect.

No hi-fi or home theater sounds like live music, and not a single one of the most exalted high-end speakers has truly flat frequency response.

Of course, everyday speakers are less accurate, which is why just about every receiver sold today has a calibration system that corrects speaker anomalies and tames room acoustic problems.

That's all fine in theory, but most speaker calibration systems only change rather than improve the sound of a hi-fi or home theater. So I'm a bit of a skeptic about the benefits of this type of processing, but I finally heard a correction system that delivered the goods. It's the DEQX HDP-Express. I listened to it over a very high-end system (owned by DEQX's publicist).

The sonic transformation was at once subtle and dramatic. I first listened to the system without any correction, and the sound was excellent. The speakers were large floor-standing towers (Focal Utopias). I played a few recordings I know well, and the sound was beautifully balanced and natural.

Ah, but then my host switched on the DEQX speaker correction, and the sound of the "Wynton Marsalis & Eric Clapton Play the Blues" CD snapped into focus.… Read more

Can sound quality be measured?

I've met a lot of audio designers in my time, and all of the best ones have one thing in common, they have great "ears." They know what good sound sounds like. The opposite camp is populated with engineers that rely exclusively on measurements to "prove" their designs are better. To my way of thinking, the second group rarely makes great sounding products. Audio is too complex to be analyzed with just numbers alone.

Nowadays I'm meeting more digital audio engineers specializing in designing room and speaker correction software. They are usually very nice … Read more