Home theater sound gets an upgrade. The Dirac Live room optimization software adds a new feature that promises to eliminate booming bass and deliver cleaner, tighter audio through your speakers.
It does this by treating your home theater setup as a unified system rather than separate speakers. By processing the audio in this way, Dirac Live Active Room Treatment enables spatial optimization, where all the speakers in the system work together to reduce bass decay times (i.e. the amount of time it takes for the bass to stop bouncing around the room) . By digitally reducing decay times, Dirac claims the sound will be devoid of the thumping, smeared bass you sometimes get with home theater setups.
Previously, the most effective way to reduce bass decay was to install physical mufflers on the walls or other places. Dirac Live Active Room denies that.
It works like active noise canceling (ANC) in headphones, where the system’s speakers actively cancel out the unwanted wavelengths from other speakers. It automatically evaluates and adjusts the bass characteristics of the entire surround sound system based on the room it’s in, leveraging each speaker’s strengths to compensate for the shortcomings of others. In that way, passive speakers effectively become active support units.
Dirac Live Active Room works with any system with more than one speaker. The more speakers in the setup, the more effective the spatial optimization will be.
It will arrive in all StromAudio AVRs via a firmware update from spring. It is included as a free upgrade for all StormAudio processors and AVRs ordered from now on. If you purchased a StormAudio product before January 1, 2023, you’ll need to buy a license to use the feature – it costs $299 (about £250, AU$440).
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