I have also reviewed REW and rePhase along with ARC3 and Sonarworks, but because the results are less than Dirac and much less than Acourate and Audiolense, I did not publish them. I have reviewed Dirac, Audiolense here and here, and Acourate here and here. EAPO, potentially better than with any commercial SW.Īlso note that my impressions on the sound after correction are based on, for the most part, sighted listening - so probably not worth much Better to look at the objective data (various diagrams and sound clips provided - though admittedly I didn't provide any for the REW + EAPO approach Very nice job! Your analysis and results coincides with mine. I'm fairly certain good results can be had in most cases with some know-how, REW and e.g.
There are for sure pros and cons of each approach - with main benefit of automatic commercial DRC SW being relative ease of use and hopefully somewhat repeatable results without the user needing to learn a whole lot about acoustics and EQ.įor sure I would advise anyone to use free solutions first (like REW and EAPO), learn a bit about it all and then maybe even make some comparisons to DRCs which offer trial/demo modes.
However, that is not really my position - I'm not even sure at this point whether I personally will go for any off-the-shelf DRC solution. However my last attempt calculating EQ with REW was a little while ago and I feel I've learned quite a bit about the topic since then - so maybe now I'd have better results following that approachĮDIT: Just thought a bit about my recent posts and realized one could read them as being very favorable towards commercial DRC solutions and dismissive of REW + EQ approach for room correction. For instance, in my opinion it is less-than-trivial to know which dips to EQ and by how much from just the multi-point average curve - REW automatic target match feature doesn't seem to take this into account - so to me that means the user needs to have some experience and do some trial-and-error.Īutomatic DRCs seem to have some algorithm to take this into account - for instance notice how Dirac Live and ARC 3 calculated very similar correction curves for me in the 45-210Hz range, although the two use a different number and spatial distribution of measurement points.
I tried with both automatic generation of EQ filter coefficients that REW does to match a target curve as well as creating manual filter banks and didn't like the results either way (on this system).