User:Ackcheng
From DRC
The beginning
Hi! It is so good to see so many familiar names from the Tact forum and UCD forum! Feels like home to me.
I begin my Hifi journey 2 years ago when I bought my Onkyo amp and a pair of Q5. My addition cycle up very quickly after I built my first DIY preamp and then a pair of OTL amp [1]! One thing I aways wonder is why the same piece of equiptment sound so differnt from my house and my friends house! One thing that comes to me after some serious search on the internet is room acoustics!
Of course, one way of solving the problem is to use various absorbers/diffuser but this will be an eye sore at home and my wife will certainly refuse! Then I come across Tact. It is a great little piece of equiptment and the one I am using is Tact 2.0s.
The setup is easy and I will not repeat it as you can probably find it elsewhere. After awhile, after I have heard an active speaker system in a friend's place, I decided that active crossover is the way to go. Another extensive search in the internet shows that there are a few options. 1. A DIY active crossover with opamp 2.digital crossover system which correct the phase difference between drivers as well. I chose the second option and bought DEQX. This piece of equipment allows 3 output for a 3-way speaker. I do not use its "room correction" function as it is really not room correction!
So, so far so good! But it doesn't end here! Now I am building a 4-way system and DEQX cannot provide a 4 way output. So, another extensive search on the internet bought me here!
Now, I am planning to sell my Tact and DEQX and I use a Audio PC to set it up! Thanks to Uli, who is very kind to give me a starting point with BruteFIR and DRC.
I have also come across this site http://members.chello.at/nordbahnfredi/ with very useful information and tips.
The convolver PC
This is the center for room correction! It is basically a PC running BruteFIR in Linux using Uli's program BruteFIR in USB. To build such a PC, you want a good sound card that can give you all the flexibilities I chose RME HDSP9652 [2]. For one thing, it has many input and outputs whick allows me to expand to home theatre room correction once I become more experienced. But most importantly, someone have used this before and it is easier for things to be sorted out if things go wrong!
This PC also need to be dead silent. To achieve this, I have chosed a silent power supply - silverstond ST30NF [3]. The case I chose is an alluminium case and the only thing that needs to be solved is the CPU fan. Oh! AMD CPU works out to be much more cooler than Intel, so I chose AMD as as the CPU for this PC!
Moving on
I have just completed my blog on digital room correction with extensive information on my setup
