A few screen shots to give you a sense of how the Dirac Live software works on the Emotiva XMC-1. The preamp ships with a version of Dirac called "Dirac LE" which is essentially the same as what I am showing here without the ability to add other calibrated microphones or setting target curves (will explain what that means shortly). Dirac Live costs an extra $99 and is worth it, IMO.
The first thing you do is set levels on the microphone - I did not take a screen shot on that (and it is not really an exciting aspect of the process to be honest); then you measure the room. Nine measurements are taken, and you can choose between auditorium, sofa, and chair layouts depending on your listening room situation. Since I listen mostly by myself in the cave, I chose the chair and the software tells me roughly where to place the microphone relative to the chair for the nine measurements. At the bottom of the screen you see the voice graph of the 7.2 measurements. If one or more of the measurements clips (too hot), a red line shows where it happened and I have to repeat the test after adjusting levels (you may notice that when I took this screen shot I had a bad measurement to the middle-left of the chair, I repeated it later.
Because measuring is a pain and I do not want to it too often (only if I change crossover points or speaker size settings, or speaker position), the next thing I do before moving on is save the measurements to the laptop's hard drive:
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Then you get to the filter creation screen. Target curves can be set for each speaker individually. The target curve is what I am asking the computer to create filters for relative to the actual measurements. I placed orange arrows next to three "handles" I can adjust on this particular curve for the L and R speakers (I can set L and R individually but chose to do them together). I can add as many handles as I want and play around with the shape of the curve if that is what I want. I can also close or open the correction "curtains" - adjust the range over which the speakers will be corrected. I placed green arrows to indicate where the curtains where set in this case (I use what the software recommends).
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Once it is done creating filters (about 40 seconds on my laptop) the software loads them into the preamp over the wifi network (the pre is hard-wired into my wifi router LAN, the laptop talks to it via wifi into the router):
This is the Dirac process. This preamp also works with Room Eq Wizard and has two separate memory banks for two sets of filters created with REW, will take screen shots of that some time in the future when I use it next. I have one set in loaded right now for some types of music, but I use teh Dirac profile most of the time.
Regards,
OBG
