I calibrated Dirac Live within an Arcam AVR 20 AV Receiver into 5.1.2 Dolby Atmos home cinema system with KEF in and on wall speakers dual T9/i subwoofers, a Sony OLED TV being used as the centre speaker and other toys.
I started this calibration with some trouble shooting, the customer was having a rare issue with the AVR20 which I had not come across before and I will always try and work these out for my customers and fix them if I can. This issue turned out out to be related to how the customer had wired the system and then configured the sound from one of his disc player sources, in this instance a DVD player. Once this was fixed I cracked on with the main calibration better setting the subwoofer levels, phase and high crossover before taking measurements and completing the calibration.
When the customer told me he was using the Sony OLED TV for the centre speaker I was worried this would pull the performance of the system down as the centre speaker is so critical for home cinema sound. To my shock it actually sounded fantastic, I was able to manage its sound in the same fashion as the KEF in and on walls to achieve a totally convincing, clear and dynamic sounding front sound stage. The key to unlocking this systems performance was the subwoofer integration and this did take me some time, especially for music.
The customer commented on how his smaller in wall speakers now sounded like floorstanding speakers which I was very chuffed about because that is the goal with subwoofer integration. I was able to pull the whole sound of the system together for very lively and dynamic movies but also very enjoyable music, especially when using the multi channel stereo mode within the Arcam AVR20.
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