cliveb;296264 Wrote: > > Would anyone care to offer some thoughts on these two differing > opinions? How can they be reconciled?
There is no doubt that DRC - or just parametric equalization - can greatly improve sound quality in the bass, at least near one listening position. The reason is simple: rooms resonate at a set of frequencies determined by their dimensions. Those resonances result in more amplitude overall, and (more importantly, I think) a much longer damping time. It's the singing-in-the-shower effect - certain notes are louder, and reverberate for much longer than others. If you listen to an acoustic bass play a scale, starting from the lowest note, you'll hear it very clearly unless you have an extremely well-treated room. Some notes sound loud, boomy and bloated. The reason equalization can help is that those resonances are (to a good approximation) just resonant frequencies in a plain old damped harmonic oscillator. When you add a notch (peak) filter to cancel one of those out, you're adding just the right thing to get rid of it. The result is not only a flat frequency response, but a greatly reduced resonance time. Here are some (artificial) plots to illustrate the idea. The vertical axis is power, left-right is frequency, out of the page is time. That giant ridge is a resonance. The second plot is the same "room" after equalization. Notice how both the frequency response and the boominess have been greatly improved. [image: http://www.hometheatershack.com/forums/attachments/rew-forum/4815d1194043965-waterfalls-bfd-2b.jpg] [image: http://www.hometheatershack.com/forums/attachments/rew-forum/4820d1194045067-waterfalls-bfd-6b-smooth.jpg] -- opaqueice ------------------------------------------------------------------------ opaqueice's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=4234 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=46903 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
