I calibrated Dirac Live within an Arcam AVR 550 AV Receiver into 5.1.2 Dolby Atmos home cinema system with KEF on wall speakers a SVS Micro subwoofer and other toys like a JVC Projector, Panasonic Blu Ray player, Apple TV.
This was a calibration for home cinema duties only as the customer has a separate HiFi system for music, a very nice one.
For Home Cinema the customer had installed as discrete speaker package as possible, if you look at the photo below, can you even see the speakers? The challenge with slim on wall speakers is their bass output and extension and despite these being well designed KEF on wall speakers the physics of a small slim speaker and their bass output cannot be beaten.
The customer had chosen his subwoofer wisely the SVS 300 Micro because it can deliver a great amount of output, but more important for this calibration was the subwoofers ability to be able to deliver higher bass frequencies fast, without colouration.
I concentrated this calibration as always initially on the subwoofer integration, this was even more crucial than usual due to the smaller and bass limited speakers being used as I mentioned, I ended up opting for a very high crossover point as this created the best sense of fullness to the systems sound and overall upper bass dynamics.
The most critical part of the calibration was the bass timing which I always do manually.
The benefit of this system was having identical speakers for all the channels which meant there was great overall cohesion to the systems sound following the bass integration and the calibration and Dirac helped to tighten the whole sound and massively improve the systems overall clarity. There was excellent left to right and front to back surround steering effects definitely helped by the sound cohesion from all speakers being the same.
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