At CES 2023, Dirac announced its new Dirac Live Active Room Treatment (ART) would debut in the spring. Dirac’s Live Active Room Treatment (ART) is the latest in its family of Dirac Live features designed to address bass resonance and room decay time to produce a cleaner, tighter bass experience. But what makes it different from existing room EQ solutions on the market? CE Pro spoke with Nilo Casimiro Ericsson, the product lead for Dirac, about Dirac Live ART and its upcoming debut in all StormAudio AVRs.
3 Bass Management Distinctions from Dirac Live ART
Room Correction
Dirac Live Active Room Treatment leverages Dirac’s expertise in MIMO mixed-phase impulse response correction technology to enable spatial optimization, whereby all speakers in a sound system cooperate with each other to accomplish what passive acoustic treatments struggle to achieve. With decay times reduced digitally and automatically, listeners experience clear sound devoid of boomy, smeared bass – as if the room itself didn’t exist.
“This impulse response correction is very unique,” says Ericsson, noting that other room EQ solutions do not change a speaker’s energy algorithm but simply adjust the gain. “It doesn’t always work because it doesn’t eliminate the noise cancellation.”
Bass Control
This feature was added by Dirac about four years ago, but the new Dirac Live ART is “bass management on steroids,” says Ericsson. When a subwoofer or multiple subs are integrated into a bass management solution, it can create “hot” and “cold” spots in the room. For more integrators, the solution is to just keep adding more subs. With Dirac Live bass control, the system identifies the problematic frequencies and applies parametric phase all-pass filter EQ that auto adjusts the width and quality of the bass.
“It’s impossible for a human ear to do it.”
Nilo Casimiro Ericsson, Dirac
“Instead of changing the gain, you have actual phase control. It’s impossible for a human ear to do it,” he says.
Dirac Live Active Room Treatment
Dirac Live Active Room Treatment automatically evaluates and adjusts the bass characteristics of the entire system, leveraging the strengths of each speaker to make up for any shortcomings in other speakers. This effectively turns passive speakers into active support units, strengthening the overall system.
Think of this as the same Active Noise Cancellation we have all become accustomed to via our headphones in an entire room. Ericsson says Dirac is taking bass management “to a higher level” by letting all the speakers collaborate to actively cancel out unwanted wavelengths originating from other speakers. This is achieved by measuring the entire setup as a unified system, instead of targeting each speaker individually, and applying advanced spatial optimization to the entire system based on the needs of each unique room.
The solution can reduce the need for managing bass response and room reflections by using physical sound dampeners on the walls.
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