User:Dwk
From DRC
This is mostly a placeholder; will work to update.
I was a very early user of DRC in experimental/prototype form, but never really got to the point of having a 'production' installation that survived for any length of time.
After spending some time in the Windows world using Thuneau Allocator (nice product), I recently discovered that support for my Emu 1820M soundcard had been added to Alsa. So, I installed Ubuntu studio to check things out.
My current system is very simple - just a plain stereo system, no digital xovers. My speakers are Yorkville U15's, which use the Unity Summation design developed by Tom Danley. Due to my very very narrow room (7'x16'), I find their controlled directivity critical in allowing a system setup that works at all. The speakers are literally placed in the corners of the room, with baffles added to 'bridge' to the walls, creating something of a soffit-mount effect. What I think this does is allows the effective radiation aperature to go from 60x60 (basic U15 design) to 90x90 (corner load), which means that the overal power response of the system should be pretty uniform.
The speakers are set up so that the primary axis crosses in front of the listening position. This is an idea that Geddes suggests with controlled directivity speakers to provide a very stable sweet spot - as you move laterally you move off-axis on the closer speaker and more on-axis to the farther one, which offsets the distance to a degree.
The long-winded description is to set up the idea that as far as systems go, my system is already pretty good with respect to room issues, at least as far as it can be in a small strange room.
My playback chain is mpd->brutefir->jack->Emu 1820M(analog)->Alesis RA150->U15. I use a Nokia 770 tablet an the phpMp web interface to control mpd.
For DRC, I quite literally did a 'one shot' setup. Recorded left and right sweeps using a slightly modified measure_jack script, and used minimal.drc. (I had to use a Delta 66 for recording the sweeps, as the Emu doesn't yet seem to work in full-duplex mode). No tweaking, no optimizing. Even so, the results are amazing at first blush. (well, ok I tweaked the pspoints file to cut off at 40hz rather than 20)
Future efforts are to actually spend time optimizing the DRC filters, and integrate some subs. The U15's only go down to ~45Hz, which isn't quite enough.
