Analyzing a short burst might help flatten the speakers, but unless there’s a longer analysis there won’t be time to analyze room acoustics. IME these days newer speakers (especially active ones) are reasonably flat, it’s more the room issues you have to watch out for, as as Andreas pointed out, the response measured will change around the room. Also (and unless you’re using a decent array,) most point-source systems don’t have a very wide field of HF coverage. If you measure in the wrong spot, the auto-eq algorithm could decide to add +15dB to the top end, and that could be bad for the tweeters and bad for people who are actually in the tweeters’ coverage. Also, if it did do a long analysis and found hole at 100Hz, how would the system know if that hole is there because of speakers’ frequency response curve, and therefore it should boost, or if that hole is there because of a room cancellation issue, and so boosting +15dB @100Hz won’t do anything, in fact it could damage the speaker? It could also be there because of an XO issue. A lot of the subs I’ve seen, even something as big as dual 18s, generally only have decent frequency response down to 30-35Hz. If you’re analyzing 20Hz-20kHz and your algorithm decides there’s not enough 20-35Hz it’ll boost that range, which the subs aren’t designed for. At best it’ll mean no change, because the subs will be protected from such freqs, but if there’s no protection (no speaker management, amps with no DSP, passive subs) you could end up distorting the low end, or even breaking something.
And peq in stead of geq all the way. Sweepable and adjustable Q: makes so much more sense than a geq (scalpel vs hatchet.)
GaryW 7 years, 5 months ago.
