TOPIC:

Looks nice, but the price seems high, since the hardware looks very similar to the much cheaper Opendrc..If half the value or more of the product is the Dirac license, i am afraid i will keep on a more DIY and open source solution ...

Can you give any more detailed specs regarding the harware, so as to allow objective comparison to the openDrc stuff?

I already have a UMIK-1 mic - can I order without the microphone ? Don't need two

devteam wrote:

Dear All,
All parts are now in stock, we hope to start shipment by end of next week!

This is fantastic! I own Dirac Live, and absolutely love it. Are there plans to offer the MiniDSP box on its own, for those of us that already have Dirac Live?

Cheers, and congrats!
Rob

I have to admit, the price is pretty deflating to me. I was expecting more like $400-$500. Or at the very least, a whole lot more connectivity, if not outputs for future crossover upgrades.

John wrote:

I have to admit, the price is pretty deflating to me. I was expecting more like $400-$500. Or at the very least, a whole lot more connectivity, if not outputs for future crossover upgrades.

As much as we like to provide value products, a good starting point before stating an expected price and comparing apples to oranges would be to have a look at the technology embedded and what's already out there:
- Standalone license www.dirac.se/en/consumer-products/dirac-rcs.aspx / 389Eur ~ 536USD
- OpenDRC is already 300, add a UMIK-1 (75USD) and a tripod and you're already circa the cost of the the MSRP we provided.
- Besides the above, the product should also reflect the fact that it took a LOT of R&D work to make that project happen.

Comparing to product with competitive or powered by Dirac would be the next step. Once you do a bit of that homework, you'll see that there is little that is even close to the results you'll get with that Dirac box. Interestingly enough, a lot of people spend a LOT more in speakers than they spend on processors...

Don't know what Dirac Live sounds like? There is a free trial online from dirac.se. We encourage everybody to try it! It's worth all your time.

If your budget is 400USD, maybe the OpenDRC would be a good alternative. Even with all the Open source implementation we pushed, it's far to achieve the results though... You can't have a Ferrari for the price of a Toyota.

DevTeam

rjay wrote:

I already have a UMIK-1 mic - can I order without the microphone ? Don't need two

Sure, we're going to update the listing online to provide that option to "remove the UMIK-1" and save 75USD. Thanks for the reminder.

DevTeam

hakimila wrote:

This is fantastic! I own Dirac Live, and absolutely love it. Are there plans to offer the MiniDSP box on its own, for those of us that already have Dirac Live?
Cheers, and congrats!
Rob

Thanks Rob! Let us get back to you on that topic. I believe that it's still in the process on how this would work out for existing Dirac Live software end users.

DevTeam

Been looking forward to seeing this come to fruition but that is a lot of cash to chump up. I know that dirac is a very expensive piece of software standalone which maybe prevents them selling as many copies as they could. I'd have thought adding it to a commercial product such as this would really open up revenue streams if the license fee had been made cheaper. Opportunity missed for both companies imho. I'm sure it works really well but not for me sorry. I was kinda lookin forward to a plugin for the minisharc but I guess that would be getting on for 400 quid.

Hopefully there will be some taps added to the input of the minisharc at some point so we can do a bit of room correction with that before the crossover section......

Stefan

Sent from my HTC One X using Tapatalk 2

devteam wrote:

Comparing to product with competitive or powered by Dirac would be the next step. Once you do a bit of that homework, you'll see that there is little that is even close to the results you'll get with that Dirac box. Interestingly enough, a lot of people spend a LOT more in speakers than they spend on processors...

Don't know what Dirac Live sounds like? There is a free trial online from dirac.se. We encourage everybody to try it! It's worth all your time.

If your budget is 400USD, maybe the OpenDRC would be a good alternative. Even with all the Open source implementation we pushed, it's far to achieve the results though... You can't have a Ferrari for the price of a Toyota.

DevTeam

My Toyota is fantastic!

By the way, i prefer to base my choices on objective reasons and specs than on marketing promises based on things like luxury and emotion.

I don't mean that the product isn't worth the money it costs, but rather that after reading the literature, i am still not convinced that:

1º Dirac Minidsp is a better piece of hardware than OpenDrc ( more processing power, or whatever else...). Can you give more details regarding what's in the box?

2º Dirac live is superior to anything i could manage to build tweaking on my own with iirs and firs. If Dirac will allow me to do things i cannot afford by myself, i am very interested to learn which things, rather than having to blindly trust the magic.

devteam wrote:

Comparing to product with competitive or powered by Dirac would be the next step. Once you do a bit of that homework, you'll see that there is little that is even close to the results you'll get with that Dirac box. Interestingly enough, a lot of people spend a LOT more in speakers than they spend on processors...
<snip>
If your budget is 400USD, maybe the OpenDRC would be a good alternative. Even with all the Open source implementation we pushed, it's far to achieve the results though... You can't have a Ferrari for the price of a Toyota.
DevTeam

You should think more before contributing a post which implies the OpenDRC product as sold by you suffers because "it's far to achieve the results though..."
Your analogy is misguided and effectively implies OpenDRC is not good.
Price does not determine if software is good.


I dont have a problem with the pricing for the new device package.

heheh.. it's good to see that this product is stirring emotions up... It's putting some spice to the topic and getting people engaged! As usual, please keep sending your comments. But please remember that a forum, like Email isn't the best place to debate any topic. Most of the time, if we'd be seating having a beer together and chatting about a similar topic, I'm sure that we'd be having much better fun.

Now let's try again to word things up so we can answer all questions.
- Dirac's technology is substantially different (algorithm loaded) than a FIR bank and some EQ. Period. That's a fact, not some marketing magic as we implemented that code for the past 1.5year into our DSP. Please read all the tech paper online that we posted, some getting quite deep on dirac's webpage. Geeks can get their share.
- On the other hand, we pushed OpenDRC and low cost Sharc based module for the past 3 years so it's not like we need to be convinced here of the benefits of the OpenDRC platform (Open=for all, affordable). If we needed that, we'd have dropped the product. We achieved to provide the lowest cost hardware convolution engine on the market for that amount of taps/usd. We continue to value all the solutions out there and keep pushing other ideas outthere e.g. miniSHARC.

With this said, it's also good to be honest and realize the following technical limitation: OpenDRC as such with its FIR + DSP structure will not be able to handle the complexity of algorithm and math involved by Dirac Live calibration tools (e.g. impulse response correction, mixed phase approach, a really easy step by step GUI). That's all we implied here with Toyota vs Ferrari. Although the same hardware, it's might be confusing maybe to some of you that a piece of DSP code + software + firmware is different but it is indeed very different.

As for those of you not impressed by magic marketing words (gotta say that it's hard to explain in words), I strongly recommend (even if you don't have any cash to purchase the product) that you take 15min of your life to install Dirac live (Free Trial!) on your PC and hear the difference! It's well worth it. We don't intend to sell the magic, we're just stating that this room correction technology does deserve the title and attention it's getting. That's all we're saying.

Quick question, in the images you have a photo of a little apple remote. Assuming the unit is controlled by the vol-FP, you recently posted in reply to a question I had in another thread that the apple remote wasn't compatible, I assume you have now found a way around that then? Or is this hardware completely different?

While I am on the subject is there any way to slow the remote sensitivity down? A quick tap on the remotes i have tried results in a 3dB change which is quite a lot when you are trying to sneak the volume up unnoticed!!

Cheers

Stefan

Olivier wrote:

My Toyota is fantastic!
By the way, i prefer to base my choices on objective reasons and specs than on marketing promises based on things like luxury and emotion.
I don't mean that the product isn't worth the money it costs, but rather that after reading the literature, i am still not convinced that:
1º Dirac Minidsp is a better piece of hardware than OpenDrc ( more processing power, or whatever else...).<strong> Can you give more details regarding what's in the box?</strong>
2º Dirac live is superior to anything i could manage to build tweaking on my own with iirs and firs. If Dirac will allow me to do things i cannot afford by myself, i am very interested to learn which things, rather than having to blindly trust the magic.

@ Olivier,

Thanks for the feedback. I love my Honda stream as well, hahaha..
- DDRC is actually the same hardware than the OpenDRC. It's just a much smarter DSP implementation + Software package than anything we've provided. That's the reasoning. A DSP algorithm isn't the same for for all. The same way a software running on a PC can range from doing something rough, to being perfect. Same applies to these embedded devices heavily running on the firmware to perfom their magic (70% of the work on today's electronic equipment). If you have extra concern, using the DDRC-22D (Digital version) will reach -128dB SNR thanks to the Burr & Brown transceiver. I don't believe that you can get any better than that..

- As for Dirac's technology, our Dirac series page is indeed flashy (we can't just target engineers with complex words.. , but did you see the user manual? It's now posted online. It does provide quite a lot of information. There are some topics like (sample rate, Impulse response correction, multiple measurements through out the room rather than ONE sweet spot) for which Dirac is really best at. The very good paper by Dirac's CEO is a great geek starting point. The smart of coming up with these FIR settings is key.

Once again, it's our word which we can understand is skewed.. So our best advice ? Please have a trial test run on the Dirac live version. Once you get addicted and don't want a PC in your Hifi setup, you can purchase a DDRC unit!

DevTeam

NoDelusions wrote:

You should think more before contributing a post which implies the OpenDRC product as sold by you suffers because "<em>it's far to achieve the results though...</em>"
Your analogy is misguided and effectively implies OpenDRC is not good.
Price does not determine if software is good.
I dont have a problem with the pricing for the new device package.

@ NoDelusions,

Thanks for your feedback and we appreciate that we shouldn't compare with an existing product. We wanted to imply that the technology behind it wasn't the same. Wrong wording and thanks for pointing this to us. The OpenDRC is indeed a great platform which a lot of you are enjoying its benefits...

Keep sending us comments if any.
DevTeam

devteam wrote:

- DDRC is actually the same hardware than the OpenDRC. It's just a much smarter DSP implementation + Software package than anything we've provided. That's the reasoning. A DSP algorithm isn't the same for for all. The same way a software running on a PC can range from doing something rough, to being perfect. Same applies to these embedded devices heavily running on the firmware to perfom their magic (70% of the work on today's electronic equipment). If you have extra concern, using the DDRC-22D (Digital version) will reach -128dB SNR thanks to the Burr & Brown transceiver. I don't believe that you can get any better than that..

Thanks for clarifying. I find OpenDRC a very nice platform. I have been waiting for the Dirac series launch to see if some upgrade of the hardware was to come, and now its clear that the added value is more on the firmware+software side. Maybe for the future, it might be a good idea to sell the firm+ soft packages, Open or Dirac, on its own to allow users to switch between platforms using the same hardware. Just my 2 cents...