Hi. I'm new to this forum, but I've been interested in room correction for some time, and have recently been trying out REW. What a great tool! A few problems running on my mac (incl. random crashes), but I've gotten far enough with it to ask this question...
Is there any hope for my poor room? I have a fairly high-end system, and I'm a compulsive optimizer, but the room itself has lots of hard surfaces (concrete floors and wall - irregular shape, and large/open to adjoining rooms). I recently upgraded my prepro to a Lexicon MC-12 v5 EQ which was a remarkable improvement in sound quality, but I'm not sure the EQ features are helping me all that much. Since discovering REW, I can now see that I have all sorts of problems...
The red trace is my room response measured without the Lexicon EQ, and the green is with it. All measurements are 1/3 octave smoothed, done with my RS 33-2055 meter, and on my MacBook Pro (I know that a laptop sound card isn't recommended, but it's all I've got right now - actually the calibrated response didn't look too bad to my eyes). The RS meter I suspect has bigger problems, particularly in the 1-2kHz range -- all measurement I take with it (even mm away from a single speaker) show a significant dip there.
You can see that the Lexicon is correctly applying EQ to bring up the 20-40Hz deficiency, but it introduces new problems at 100Hz (this is the maximum EQ setting, which really doesn't sound too good -- the low or medium settings sound like a better compromise).
All-in-all, my system actually does sound good, but looking at these curves, I'm inclined to buy a FBQ2496. However, I'm afraid that even 24 filters/channel might not be enough, or that I'll end up making things sound like phasey mess after getting the response flat. I'd appreciate any advice from the gang here (and "get a new room" is not an option right now
). Thanks!
Warren