Reply To: Room correction without Sonarworks?

[Erik DuijsParticipant]

Hey Anthony,

I saw that video some time ago too. Quite interesting to see all the steps to go through, and I think that guy made great points putting the whole idea and value of 'room correction EQ' in proper perspective.
What I tried is obviously quite simplistic in comparison to Sonarworks, so the results are probably not nearly as precise. But it did point out some very obvious problems in my problematic room.

However in the end I don't use my mickey-mouse room EQ effort; I just worked a bit more on turning some knobs on my speakers (turn up the tweeter a bit, turn down the woofer a bit) and adding one EQ band to fix one obvious problem in the low-end.

Anyway, it seemed my white-noise calibrated EQ also added some issues of its own that made it hard to really trust:
1. The matched EQ did a LOT of VERY heavy EQ-ing, suggesting the biggest problem is still my room.
2. As a result the phase rotating at all these bands seemed to change things outside of the frequency response; not sure if I can trust my ears when checking phase issues between tracks that way (?).
3. The linear phase option of the EQ added some side effects of its own that I didn't like.
4. It's just overall a strange sound to hear out of the speakers in my (quite problematic) room. And my speakers aren't bad.

What I really need to do is fix issues in my listening environment first before thinking of of room correction EQ. For the moment I still mostly depend on headphones, with my speakers as a 2nd option to hear things in another context.
I still very much believe in the idea of proper room correction EQ such as SonarWorks, but only after having a decent sounding listening room to begin with.

Erik