I visited a customer to Dirac Live calibrate predominantly their dolby atmos home cinema system which is a big system consisting of an Arcam AV 860 processor, Yamaha 11 channel power amplifier, Monitor Audio speakers and 2 big ported SVS subwoofers. The customer had previously had the system calibrated but he wasn’t happy with the results, the system wasn’t balanced at all well and he had all boom and no punch to his bass.
I started the calibration by looking into why the customer wasn’t getting more punchy bass from 2 ported SVS subwoofers that I know are ferocious in their bass delivery. I used Dirac to measure in similar fashion to REW and could straight away see where the problem was, the customers main seat was in a huge bass null, huge. I started to work around this by looking into subwoofer phase and that had no effect on the bass null. I then used in the inbuilt dsp within the subwoofer to reduce the bass null in the frequency regions I was able to which worked fantastically well, I then calibrated the system and used Dirac to fix the rest. The result was a fantastically well balanced system with incredible bass quality and punch like how 2 big ported subs should, they should kick your ass.
The customer also had Dirac running for his hifi system via a miniDSP SHD unit, this was also calibrated previously and the customer was happy with how the system was sounding. As the miniDSP has 4 memory slots and only 3 were being used I said the customer should give me a chance. I used the customers hints on what he liked to setup a calibration and overall system sound that was hugely improved over what the previous calibrator had done. I created a sound with more but tighter bass, a better overall focused sound with more presence and soundstage clarity.
A really lovely hifi system sounding really fantastic.