The Battle of the Titans: Audyssey vs Dirac Room Correction
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- Опубліковано 30 чер 2024
- Is Dirac Live worth the upgrade from Audyssey? In this video, we will explore the pros and cons of two of the most popular digital room correction systems available for the new line of Denon & Marantz home cinema receivers
00:00:00 Introduction
00:01:27 Dirac Live upgrade path
00:02:47 Audyssey MultEQ-XT32 and SUB EQ HT in detail
00:03:16 Dirac Live Bass Control
00:03:36 Conclusion
00:04:02 Dirac Live ART “Active Room Treatment”
00:04:51 Audyssey Dynamic EQ
00:05:22 “MultEQ Editor” & MultEQ-X
00:06:00 Frequency response comparison
"home theater system"
"home theatre setup"
#roomcorrection #atmos #calibration #hometheater #audiophile #audyssey #cinemasound #dolbyatmos #dirac #heightchannels #macatmos #5.1.2 #7.1.4 #9.1.6 #subwoofer #subwoofertest #graphicequalizer #equalization #equalizer #filters #microphonesetup #dolby #minidsp #denon #marantz
"multeq xt32"
"audyssey einmessen"
"multeq-x"
"audiosciencereview"
"multeq editor app"
"audyssey calibration"
"dolby atmos test"
"minidsp 2x4" - Наука та технологія
Worked years with audyssey pro on serveral receivers. I was never satisfied. Enable audyssey will degrade your sound completely. Later when i moved to dirac on the Datsat Rs20I it was a huge difference, Dirac was able to keep the quality of the audio and combine it with the correction.
I'm very satisfied with Dirac.
Thank you Onkyo RZ50!!
Nice video, thanks for this! Is there a way to manually achieve impulse improvement with REW in the way dirac does it? Using Dirac the impulse peak is much cleaner than without, so how is this done? I would love to see an in-depth video about how to manually tune the system with the "dirac" correction.
Impulse plot is in time domain so it will improve with phase corrections as phase is closely related to time delay. The easiest and the best way to do it is to apply crossover phase correction. Dirac tries that but it's far from optimal. You need to find out your speakers' crossover frequencies and their orders and create a phase correction for them in rePhase. This tutorial will help: ua-cam.com/video/pbCJjNw3bJ8/v-deo.html
You can also apply a gentle excess phase inversion after your PEQ filters which will further improve the impulse response.
@@ocaudiophile thanks for the quick response
I have the Denon AVR-4800 with both the Audessy PC app and Dirac Live. Direc did not set my crossover point but it did set my two subs volume and matched them up perfectly to my main speakers. I tested with REW and the combined sub and main speaker output was 6db higher at the crossover point then each speaker by itself as it should be. With Audessy I really struggled with a null around 80 to 100Hz, but Dirac seemed to fill that null, giving me much better upper bass sound. My two subs have powers meters and with Dirac the amps are putting out less power for the same amount of volume level. My main problem with Dirac is the lack of volume based EQ as you noted, but what I really don’t like is the lack of a “night mode”. This could end up being a deal breaker for me as I have to turn up the volume to easily hear be dialog, but then the sound effects may end up too loud waking up my wife. Any chance Dirac will add this feature?
Thanks for the info. I've the same problem with night listening. There's no plan of a dynamic volume like addition to Dirac as far as I know but they're a company with continuous innovation and development so you never know.
Just make a Day and Night setting and you are done.
I have the X4800 as well. Out of the box I immediately used Audessey. I never heard what it sounded like without room correction. I bought it to upgrade my 15y/o Yamaha receiver, which I love. 2 things I noticed immediately; the Volume was 10-15db lower at the same volume setting, AND I heard good center imaging for the first time. It sounded like my center channel was being used, even though it was only stereo. It was very noticeable watching UA-cam Videos where someone was talking. It immediately impressed me. When I got the X4800 I also upgraded my sub to a Klipsch RP1200SW. That was updating my Klipsch RW12d, which was also 15 years old. The clarity, and detail was great, but the output wasn't impressive. I never felt the bass like I did with my old subwoofer. I hooked up the old one, out of curiosity and ran a dual sub system. that helped a little, but it was hard to tell. Fast forward to this week. I just purchased Dirac Live full bandwidth with bass control multi sub. I know nothing about room calibration, or using calibration software, but the bundle was 30% off, so why not? lol. After spending most of the day, trying to figure out how to use it, I got it to export a filter to my X4800. Wow, was that a night and day difference. Good or bad, the jury is still out. lol. I keep going back and forth between Audessey and Dirac to see which sound better. It's hard for me to tell though. the more I get into this home audio journey, the less I seem to know about what sounds good and what doesn't. lol. Right away, I notice the volume is back. Dirac is significantly louder than Audyssey on my system. I thought my system sounded good with Audyssey, and the louder I cranked it the better sounding it got. Dirac sounds crystal clear, the channel separation and center imaging is noticeably more distinct. Turning Dirac on is like turning the Loudness button and an HD button on at the same time. The bass is noticeably better sounding too. The dynamics isn't like anything I've heard before. Every little sound is so discrete and crisp. It's great! It's not all good though. While the bass sounds great, its not strong at all. When hooked to my old Yamaha my 1 sub would knock things off of shelves and you'd feel the bass in your chest. I get nothing close to that now. I hear the bass, but I don't feel it at all. the "warmth" I got with Audyssey is gone. the sound with Audyssey seems..."richer". I don't know how to explain it. Dirac, seems almost...."surgical" and very clean. with Audyssey, the louder I cranked it the better it sounded. with Dirac, it almost hurts my hears to crank it to the same level. I haven't watched any movies yet, since I just set this up yesterday, but as far as music goes, at louder volumes it sounds really bright and grating to my ears. I have been using Tidal to test music. Metallica's "One" overall sounds really good with Audyssey. I listen to it with Dirac and the instruments sound much more life like, the quality of the bass is great, but again I can't feel it. I should be able to feel the kick drums on that track, but it's not much different with Audyssey. Once the vocals start, I immediately need to turn it down. it's crisp and clear, but somehow not pleasant. With Audyssey, it didn't sound as crisp, but it was never unpleasant, no matter the volume. It's not like this with every track, but a good amount of the ones I tested. Tracks from Pentatonix sound incredible. Once I learn more about curves, I may play with it a bit more. I didn't adjust what Dirac gave me, and I let it correct full bandwidth. Does what I'm experiencing make any sense? Did you experience anything similar, and do you have any suggestions? I will eventually upgrade the rest of my speakers, but for now, I want to get the best sound I can for both Music and Movies. Sorry for the long comment, I've been playing with this for 2 days straight, so it's fresh in my mind.
Dirac Live bass has just been released for cinema series
Any idea on how many filter taps Dirac uses? I know Audyssey has an insane 16,384. Wasn’t sure if you exported any text files that could give you insight into that information. Thanks for all the videos you post!
Audyssey XT32 uses 1024 taps, 16384 is the FFT length. Dirac Live uses a .bin file for FIR filters like MiniDSP. It's encrypted but from the file size, it can be estimated to be somewhere between 8192 and 16384 taps.
Want to see a deeper dive into both calibration comparisons
I have a lot more data in fact but I wanted to keep this video simple enough for the average consumer. I'll do a full tech review for you guys soon.
@@ocaudiophile cool looking forward to the indepth video
I reckon I should wait until DLBC comes out for a proper comparison though. This is a bit unfair to Dirac.
Audyssey looked better on that graph. I hope you get MQX to test it out. It’s integration with REW is great
Actually, Audyssey sounded better, too but I didn't want to ruin the party ;)
How did the phase responses compare?
Dirac is better between 200-1000Hz, Audyssey doesn't apply any phase correction but with deq the phase response was better than Dirac at 100Hz
Do you know if dirac full range correction will help with higher frequencies or with treble
In my case, Dirac repeatedly dimmed the high frequencies a bit too much. I need to remeasure before I derive a conclusion.
I saw you said Audyssey sounded better in another comment. I didn't get that impression. I have the Marantz AV 10 running 7.2.4. YPAO did a better job than Audyssey in my opinion. I actually even preferred no-correction to Audyssey.
In my listening, I found Dirac to sound better. I'm wondering if that's because of phase alignment. Audyssey and YPAO (Yamaha RX-A6A I had previously) both complained about the phase of my front two speakers. I wonder if Dirac fixed the phase issues, and that's why it sounds better with less ear fatigue.
YPAO had way more bass than both Audyssey and Dirac. After calibrating, the AV 10 sounded pretty bad, so I kept looking at other options. I eventually bought Dirac, ran the calibration, didn't touch the curve (since I didn't know what I was doing), and turned up both subs +7dB. After that, demo content had the bass impact I was originally getting from the RX-A6A.
I didn't realize Dirac was so limited. I'm interested in the bass fixing because it can tweak it at different levels without much intervention on my part. But from what you're saying, unless you get your speaker crossovers and a bunch of other info, Dirac isn't gonna be able to compete with manual EQ and REW.
From my perspective, it's a lot simpler for me to setup Dirac, but my center channel sounds a bit boomy in some scenes even at 60Hz crossover, so I'm wanting to know how to improve clarity and that's why I'm focusing on your channel right now. Center channel clarity has been an ongoing issue for me. I use a 7-channel Monolith amp which should be plenty for my Polk Legend L400 center, but who knows. My ears are no more than 6' away from it at any given seating position.
Any idea what to look for with REW?
Lack of center channel clarity is usually because of boomy bass in the room which thorttles mid and high frequencies. You have to get the bass right first then the centre channel will come out.
Auf meinen Denon x4800 h habe ich beide vollversionen von Dirac und Audissey X und beide schon mehfrach eingemessen. Klanglich und von den Funktionen ist Audissey X immer weit vorne.
Nice, where did your sweet voice go? ^^ On my side i decided to go in full manual for my 5.3 system - still tedious but much more interesting and rewarding - room cal using your tutos using Jriver and MOTU (65k taps for each channels, perfect sync with video etc, VBA/DBA stuff, still need to test your last mixed phase approach). Do you have any clue if the A.R.T from Dirac can be somewhat reverse engineered with manual calibration? Seems quite "easy" intellectually but in practice no absolute idea on how is the measuring and data analysis processes (they say they measure for each position one extra measurement with all speakers on and it's doing its magic afterwards)... anyway, good job and thank you!!
Even I cant listen to my own voice and broken English so I feel for you guys :) It was possible to use AI for this video but with tutorials I will have to keep talking.
Frankly, I am not a big fan of either correction system and I hack and use Audyssey to apply my manual calibration to the receiver. ART is using a technique very similar to a double bass array hence the filter decsribed in my virtual bass array video. VBA fires an opposite impulse to counteract the wall reflection and kills the standing wave. ART sends this counter impulse from another speaker in the room. The problem is, with the convolution engines at hand, we can apply a filter to one channel at a time. We need some engine which will simultaneously work on multiple channels. I doubt that ART is doing it with more than two speakers at a time but even that's currently not possible with manual convolution. I hope some day I wake up with an idea to mimic that but it looks technically unlikely unless MiniDSP or someone else comes up with a kit that can do that.
@@ocaudiophile what i understood from other technical videos is that considering one speaker to reproduce the sound, ART is sending some kind of invert impulse in frequency range up to 150Hz using all other existing speakers in the room. if i understand well this would need for each channel input, for ex Lchannel, to send to each speaker a filtered signal to the L speaker (Main correction) and a signal of L channel to every other speaker with a kind of Phase invert + delay corresponding to distance between both main and the other involved speaker... and this, dedicated to each other speaker🤯. If you scale up to each channel you would need to mix everything up at the end for EACH speaker, many ways to make a mistake and messing up rather than improving.. if i understand well your point, I think in practice with the convolution engine in Jriver, camilladsp or whatever, you can make any channel mix you want before and after the filtering, i'll try it for fun but not sure. The key would be in what extent ("force of compensation") would you need to apply such a filter? which decay I want in the frequency range ? NO IDEA...
You can start by generating the VBA filter from a different speaker instead of the same speaker in my method but I still doubt it's doable with channel mixing in a convolution engine.
@@ocaudiophile I Just tried now with a VBA designed for L Speaker, and send the filtered signal to the R speaker. To remove the "main" signal of L Channel in the R speaker I mix the filtered VBA with an Inverted IR dirac and that do the trick. for the test i don't put R channel audio to the R speaker so it's only mono. This works it theory, in practice.....🤔 i need to measure and do some A/B testing. I can scale up easily to all other speakers (they are already time aligned)
@@dudu341 I am about to launch an updated VBA tutorial ;)
Hi have you ever used smaart v9 software? Shows realtime data.
You mean RTA? Is it better than REW? I once installed Smaart free trial but it expired until I could start to try :(
@@ocaudiophile smaart live transfer then capture open file in REW modify with eq curves export file to rephase then last to eqapo sounds nice.
Pricing is all but similar in Europe.
Example : Marantz Cinema 50 is 2500$ (2300€), but in Europe it’s price is 2000€ (2180$).
Also, Denon 4800 is much more expensive then Marantz Cinema 50.
Thanks for the info!
I want to know what dirac do to the output of my dac so I use my audio interface for loopback. Is seems that most of the part it's using typical PEQ since the phase response is exact the same as the minimum phase version of that frequency response. Only at higher frequency did I see the excess phase. Might only apply FIR correction at higher frequency.
However, even at low frequency, it's hard to produce that target created by dirac......I use rew with 17 filter bands and I can only say maybe it's close.
The bands and Q dirac is using should be a lot.
It applies minimum phase filters for frequency response correction and applies all-pass filters for phase correction. It uses inversion rather than PEQ. It's the same thing but inversion is more accurate. I have a video on inversion with REW if you are interested.
@@ocaudiophile wow！ much appreciate, I'll check it later.
@@ocaudiophile ah...I now use rephase to do the crossover filter. Maybe that's why I didn't see dirac doing its work. Maybe it'll correct minimum phase crossover if the system isn't FIR crossover?
@@ocaudiophile Another question, if I have a impulse file for crossover and phase linearization already. Can I merge it with another impulse file to do the DRC? Thanks
@@user-dh7lt4we2t Yes, you just need to multiply them (trace artihmetic: A x B)
Can you use audyssey app for arcam receiver?
No, but you can export arc measurements to REW with a script linked in the description of Audyssey ART video.
@@ocaudiophile can you make a video on it please?
Noted!
Looking at the graph at the end none of them hit the target curve
It's true and I repetead the measurements many times. Interestingly I once forgot Audyssey on while Dirac was active and this measurement had the best response :)
Denon 3800H and I found the Dirac Live with Bass Management to be superior to Audyssey. My system never sounded better.
By default settings and in fully automated mode, DLBC will easily beat Audyssey but with some extra work, Audyssey can be turned into a very competent calibration tool.
Those prices are just hurtful after spending $2500
I agree.
av10 is 7k, it is crazy to spend another 800. save money better
ART is worth the cost but lesser Dirac versions can be beaten by the free Audyssey and multeq editor app.
@@ocaudiophile what is ART
Dirac Active Room Treatment
This looks like Dirac acted like YPAO and essential didn't do anything for LFE?
It doesn't without bass control option.
@@ocaudiophile
Thanks for the reply. I wonder why it is so hard to get a straight reply to this. I have been told that the "Full Range" dirac does EQ for the subs by other Reviewers. And the "Ripewave" Channel did extensive testing of Audyssey vs. Dirac on the X6800 and seemed quite surprised when the response on Dirac looked really bad after enabling Bass Management (essentially just enabling the crossover) when it seemed pretty obvious to me, that they were now seeing the response from the uncorrected Subwoofers in the low frequency range, as opposed to the full range, corrected response of that Speaker alone. Sadly Ripewave never posted any REW results for the Subs alone, this could have easily confirmed what was going on...🤷♂️
I don't use Dirac for a long time now but there's some info that might help you here:
www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/what-is-dirac-dlbc-doing-to-my-sound.50786/
@@ocaudiophile
I got my Onkyo RZ70 yesterday and ran a quick and dirty Dirac measurement. Turns out that it does correct Subs (I have two) reasonably well, even without BC. It is a little worse than MultEQ-X on my system. With Bass Control it does a little better than MultEQ-X but sadly sets the crossovers a little higher than I would have liked on my fronts. It also runs the Subs quite "hot" which I generally like, but it might be about 3-5db too much, even for me...😁
Dirac over corrects high frequencies.
Hi OCA, how can I reach you? an email address? a page I can DM perhaps?
Unfortunately, I can't give out my email here. You can share google drive links here if you need to share a file or something.
Why waste so much money to add dirac if we can get an onkyo that already has dirac for 1000usd....ridiculous!!!
Because Onkyo has been pretty terrible for the last decade or so.
@@dextermorgan1 true... But the 2020/2021 range seems like a real comeback
Onkyo doesn’t have Auro 3D
DL BC multisub > DL > Audyssey ... 😂
Not for long 😉