I calibrated Dirac Live within an Arcam AVR390 in the final build stage of an beautiful Home Cinema for a customer in Surrey. The customer had to go into work unexpectedly and he trusted me to get on and do a great job for him. He has a lovely system in a lovely big room and I decided to do a full set of 17 Dirac Measurements to give me as much data as possible to do my thing.
The systems consists on in wall and in ceiling Sonance speakers, 2 SVS SB2000 subwoofers, Arcam AVR390 as a Pre with an Emotiva 7 channel Power amplifier, Sony 4K 760es Laser Projector with a 130 inch screen and Panasonic UB9000 UHD Blu Ray Player.
I started the calibration by checking the subwoofers one at the front and one at the back were in the best phase with each other and I turned them up quite a bit realising that work better for the calibration as a whole. The customer had made me aware that they wanted a big cinema experience but was also conscience of their close by neighbours and not wanting to disturb them.
I spent an hour working with Dirac and the Arcam setup controls to perfectly balance the front sound stage and then to correctly integrate the bass and integrate the centre speaker to be audible present in the middle of the sound field even though it was low down below the screen. This took some time and some clever manual tweaking.
I set the bass to big and powerful but without being OTT or overbearing when it shouldn’t and nice balance to adhere to the customers requirements and I integrated the whole sound field together so the rear speakers combined with the rest create a sound bubble that you sit in to experience the movie you are watching.
Customer Feedback
I can highly recommend Terry Ellis. Having had a dedicated home cinema room for some 20 years. I was very fortunate to find Terry on Google search recently. I needed my new home cinema sound installation set up, calibrated (Arcam 390, Emotiva 7 channel Power Amp, 7 Sonance speakers & 2 SVS 2000Subs ) having been let down by my installer. Prior to Terrys calibration the sound was harsh and we were forever fiddling with the the volume . Some 4 hours later we have Sound! A truly amazing & immersive experience . No need to worry about the volume! A pure joy. Terry is very passionate about getting it right and understanding what you want to hear from your set up(more/less bass etc) Sharing all the details of his calibration and reasoning behind the settings.
Top man, I wish you much success with your business. AK (Surrey)
