hi i'm scott newnam ceo of audio advice
this video is all about doing a dirac calibration and i just
want to give you a little bit of preface before we go into it first
as you might imagine at audio advice we've used pretty much every calibration
tool out there and i've got to say if you're about to use dirac you've
got one of the best if not the best calibration tools that exists in
the world today it is truly incredible so there's a few levels
of dirac i'll just point out as you're getting ready to calibrate
some of the original products or core products that
are out they have the light version of dirac meaning you can
calibrate up to about 500 hertz for most people that's going to be
enough they're trying to get the lower bass
addressed in their room then as you go up into generally more expensive
products what happens is the manufacture of the product cuts a deal
with dirac and it pays for what you get in it
so if you get into things like rcam it comes with the full version
of direct built into it and then when you get up into something like a jbl
synthesis processor you actually also get full bass
optimization so there's there's three different versions there you'll see you
can actually upgrade your versions um what i'm going
to show is the full version but it's exactly the same to do it for 500hz and
below if you've got the light version there's
obviously a little bit additional value going to the full version but
it's, you know it's incremental then if you go to full bass management
dirac live bass control i show that at the end of the video most
people don't have that and it's a it's an upgrade for most systems out
there unless it's something like the jbl synthesis processor
i would really only recommend that if you've got say three or more subs
the real advantage is it's blending your subs with
all of the other speakers and trying to figure out all the right crossovers
everywhere else but i've done a lot of calibrations on
it i think for most people you got one sub maybe two subs uh it's
not necessary again really hardcore people really into
it then you're going to want to do it and i'll show it both ways
so first things first what you want to do is set up your
first your processor or your receiver and then make sure your room is
identical to the way that you would be watching a movie so in other words if
you've gotten curtains closed make sure they're closed if you've got
seats out all the things that you would do so that the room is set up exactly
how you would use it the next thing you need to do is i want
you to turn off any fans you've got turn off any hvac systems anything
that's giving you background noise the trick in calibrating well is having
as good a signal to noise ratio as you could possibly have
then go through set up your processor as you always would in other words
set your distances go in and set your spl levels
everything so that if your dirac's ever turned off it works well but also this
will speed up your direct process and i'll talk a little bit more about that
when we get into it so with all that said i'm now going to jump in and i'm
going to screen record and show you me calibrating in a room
that's got a full five channel system we've got
four in the ceiling and we've got four subs so it's a full
system out there and you'll just get a full sense of it i'll speed through some
parts a little bit faster with that let's jump into the recording
when you first open up the software you're going to see any dirac live
devices that are on the system in this case the arcam av40
you need to make sure they're on the same network okay so on this page is
where you set up your mic you'll see on the left is the mic
that's in the computer obviously you don't want to use that one on the right
is a much nicer mic as you might imagine we calibrate them at audio device
we use really nice mics you right-click here
and you'll see the calibration files right below it but
uh you'll be able to load any calibration file nice mics all come with
them so if you've got an arcam for
instance the mic came with it there's also a text
file that you get that you'll load up here it's pretty
simple every time you go in afterwards it'll be there
one thing of note when you set up your mic
and you're actually putting it in the room you're going to generally want the
mic sitting straight upwards in other words
the microphone itself is facing the ceiling and you'll
use that for all your calibrations no matter where it sits
let's go ahead and move on now we're going to move on to actually setting the
different levels
now before i talk you through what you're seeing on the screen right now
let me give you a little bit of background
one when you set up your processor or avr make sure that you put in
all of the exact speakers in other words you know your left
center right whether you've got surrounds or rears first
the second thing you'll do is go ahead and put in your speaker distances and
your levels if you do that there should not be much
work on the page that you see here what this page is really doing is
putting everything at about the same level when it plays the test tones so
when you go into this page if all of your levels and distances are set
you should really be able to just change the master output you see there on the
left and adjust it and almost every one of
the speakers when you click play below it
should show up with green and so you'll see in this case
when i hit it on the front right you'll see me go up into the green area what
you want is every speaker to be in the green area
it's essentially putting every speaker within a similar
loudness gain level
in this case i'm walking through one by one don't
change the mic gain if you look over on the left leave the mic gain at 100%
because you want your signal to noise to be as good as you possibly can get it
so you're going to adjust the master output which changes
the spl level of everything coming out and then tweak every speaker to the
right amount so they all show up in green
you've already got your subs if you've got a powered sub
you'll have that already set into a neutral level
and have already run your calibration software on it
preferably in advance if you don't obviously this will calibrate it
as well within the system now i'm going to just speed it up for purposes of this
video and you can see i just need to get everything
into the green so just work your way through
and this is basically a balance of setting the master volume and then
adjusting each speaker so for instance you can see that for my top left and
right i have the gains really high up there
because those are smaller speakers okay go to the next level i'm going to
choose focus imaging there you could have chosen to
want a full couch or spread the imaging or have it focused
now here you're going to choose the first place to measure you'll see i
chose it right in the middle it always have you do that that is the most
important measurement so make sure your microphone is set
there there's no noise in the room you've turned off all your hvac systems
fans anything else to do this first calibration and it's going to run
through test tones again i'm speeding it up
but it run test tones and now i've completed the measurement from the very
first center position the rest of these positions you can
actually do in any order that you want you can bounce around and test them
ideally do as many as you can possibly do as it gets up to
a larger number you get to seven eight nine
obviously the incremental benefits reduce so i'm speeding it up here you
see i've done now seven different ones and
i'm gonna move over to proceed to filter design
i'll click on it and again i'm gonna speed this up through the pre-processing
but there's a bunch of math that happens that's
really cool okay so now you can actually see the curve
that came out from all of the listening and you'll see first i showed you sort
of left right what the curves were in the center
notice what i'm doing here i can actually grab the center because it's a
similar speakers left and right and group it so it automatically groups
the speakers that would naturally be the same
it had the center different i could put it in here so i could actually
adjust my curve one time and it would apply to all three
obviously you can see the center is a little bit different so i'm pulling it
out you can see my left and right surrounds
and the subs you'll see they follow a very similar curve because they're the
same speakers that are in the system here you
can see you actually have a curtain you can pull this curtain forward and
backward to basically say don't change anything outside of the curtain
again jumping into the center here what i want to show you is you could actually
just export this and put it right into your processor but
you see these areas where it's having to increase the speaker
quite a bit the gain to match the target curve you
can zoom in like i'm doing here and what i
want you to do is try not to ever have the gain go over
about 6 db increase for any frequency and the
reason is it starts pushing the speaker too hard in that frequency
and you don't want to damage the speaker or really pull away from anything else
so you'll notice here i'm just going to adjust it to follow the natural path
of the speaker itself and i'm just so it doesn't have to add quite as much
gain you can add as many points as you want
again i just zoomed in and i'm going to add these points i'm not going to go
through every single one but you get the point
instead of just exporting exactly as it comes out if you see that you've got
areas where it really is having to increase the gain
a lot from the natural curve of the speaker
that comes out to the loaded curve just go through and do these adjustments you
see i'm doing here and you can do it in any place i could also do it over there
you'll see in the lower frequencies at sort of
400 hertz etc now i've zoomed back out and you can get
a sense and i would go through and do this in most places here where it drops
quite a bit the other thing i'll mention is some of the nicer
processors come with their own curve so what's in here by default is the
dirac curve if you've got a harmon product like arcam
or jbl you can actually click up in the on this curve and it
will allow you to download the harmon curve and they've
come up with what they think is the optimal curve
for mid size speakers or subs etc and so that's that's pretty cool as well
but what you're seeing right here are the dirac curves which is a pretty
standard curve that you'll see now i'm looking at the
subs you'll see there's some areas that i would correct
where it looks like it's having to pull the sub up and by the way these
corrections i think tend to make more sense down in lower frequencies on
subs so for instance you can see here somewhere around you know 40 to 50 hertz
i've got this drop out if i tried to push it more than
about 6 db let's say i pushed it up 10 db
to hit that curve from what the room was calculating
you're just going to have way too much pushing in that one frequency which is
going to sort of bottom out the sub and it's just you're not going to
hear it as well in the other frequencies or the sub itself
will you know fully bottom out so you make these little adjustments through
again i'm not making them all just giving a sense of how they work
and then you see down here you can actually export the filter
so now i proceed to the export i can name it i've got three opportunities
in the arcam piece so i can actually do different calibrations say one that i
want to pull up bass etc i'm saving this one as
demonstration in dirac it's now exporting it to the device now
what i'm going to do is i'm going to add full bass optimization so
you have to pay more to get this unless you have the jbl
or some of the more advanced pro equipment but with full
dirac live bass control you'll see it overrides
my crossovers you'll see right here at 46.1 hertz
and i will go through and show you different examples if you look at my
front left and right it dropped it all the way down to 26.9 so in this room
these are full range front left and centers and because of that dirac
saw that it should move more bass into those to spread the bass across the
room and so theoretically this is just a killer idea because it's
finding the perfect crossover for each speaker
to provide the best bass response throughout the room so for instance if
you only had one or two subs i'll make one point here which is i
found you really need to have three or more
subs to make it worth going to full bass optimization so most systems will not
need that but i just wanted to show you how to do it here again if you've got
questions about this feel free to give us a call at audio
advice you can go to audioadvice.com you can chat with us email us give us a call
or if you're in north carolina drop by our charlotte or raleigh showrooms
and we'll be happy to help you out
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