Well, boys and girls, I now totally get what audio in the 21st Century will look like. Take an incredibly talented speaker designer, build in amps that are perfectly matched to the speakers, and add a DSP module. In one shot, you have eliminated most of the impediments to great audio, the things that actually ruin the sound of your system, namely the amp speaker interface, the Crossover (which usually just ruins sound) and the speaker/Room interface!
Usually, this type of gear is the provenance of the more nerdy, computer audiophile types. Not an area I choose to play in, for want of appropriate computer skills and time. Or, they have been produced for studio types, whose gear is usually set up to hear what is technically wrong in a recording, rather then for the enjoyment of music.
However, when an audio good guy like Pat McGinty, renowned for making some of the all time best two way speakers (Meadowlark Kestrel and Shearwater), as well as some true audio greats, like the fantastic Meadowlark Heron, takes on a project like this, it's time to take note.
So what does this all look like? From the Pat McGinty:
Bass EQ has always been a problem. Room treatments, bass traps, tortured experiments with placement, the three little knobs on your subwoofer. Bah!Finally there is an easy and effective solution.Here’s how we do it:Place a “perfect” bass system in a real-world room and you get a mess of peaks and suck-outs. Here’s what we get from the right channel BONECRUSHER in our lab.
This system has flat output from 10 - 200Hz. But in the room we get big fat peaks in the mid and upper bass that sound bad. So we use the PEQ function in our DSP platform to simply mirror them out. It’s fun, done in real time with both the analyzer and PEQ windows open on our laptop, we make incremental corrections that add up to a full set of equalizations. Try to do this with the three little knobs and some fuzzy stuff.
That took 5 minutes.And here’s the result.The right channel’s done. Now do the left. Play your bass reference tracks for a subjective confirmation of your work and you’ll find that you’ve nailed it. That simple.
Now you can put just about any Meadowlark bass system into just about any room with the confidence of knowing you have the tools to succeed. These tools combined with Dual Band Bass and our training bring a whole new level of realism to the bass.
Usually, this type of gear is the provenance of the more nerdy, computer audiophile types. Not an area I choose to play in, for want of appropriate computer skills and time. Or, they have been produced for studio types, whose gear is usually set up to hear what is technically wrong in a recording, rather then for the enjoyment of music.
However, when an audio good guy like Pat McGinty, renowned for making some of the all time best two way speakers (Meadowlark Kestrel and Shearwater), as well as some true audio greats, like the fantastic Meadowlark Heron, takes on a project like this, it's time to take note.
So what does this all look like? From the Pat McGinty:
Bass EQ has always been a problem. Room treatments, bass traps, tortured experiments with placement, the three little knobs on your subwoofer. Bah!Finally there is an easy and effective solution.Here’s how we do it:Place a “perfect” bass system in a real-world room and you get a mess of peaks and suck-outs. Here’s what we get from the right channel BONECRUSHER in our lab.
This system has flat output from 10 - 200Hz. But in the room we get big fat peaks in the mid and upper bass that sound bad. So we use the PEQ function in our DSP platform to simply mirror them out. It’s fun, done in real time with both the analyzer and PEQ windows open on our laptop, we make incremental corrections that add up to a full set of equalizations. Try to do this with the three little knobs and some fuzzy stuff.
That took 5 minutes.And here’s the result.The right channel’s done. Now do the left. Play your bass reference tracks for a subjective confirmation of your work and you’ll find that you’ve nailed it. That simple.
Now you can put just about any Meadowlark bass system into just about any room with the confidence of knowing you have the tools to succeed. These tools combined with Dual Band Bass and our training bring a whole new level of realism to the bass.
) is whether, as loudspeaker systems using components like this (tailored, on board amplification electronics and DSP) become more and more commonplace, they'll all sound more or less exactly alike -- in any room.
