TOPIC:

Hi all, this is intended to be an expose on my journey through Dirac in my car. I tried getting my car to sound good A couple of years ago to no avail, so I just left it alone and accepted it for what it was for a couple of years. It's not that it sounded terrible, but I wasn't able to achieve my main design objectives, which were a sense of space in the sound, the boundaries disappearing, the speaker disappearing. I could never get that.

So I finally decided that Dirac was the next stop on my upgrade path. I wasn't sure what to expect and I was a bit nervous about it, but after listening to how it sounds tonight I'm really glad I made the switch.

So what have I learned about it so far?

So, the very first time I ran it, I didn't get very good results. I did my measurements with myself sitting in the driver's seat and I just chose spots for each of the measurements that seemed reasonable to me. It took me awhile to figure out that it works best if you don't sit in the driver's seat when you do the measurements, it's better to measure the acoustic environment empty, at least in my experience so far.

I have also tried various iterations of the focused setting and the wide setting, and have been impressed with the consistency of sound throughout the car on those settings.

I've also tried various EQ curves, doing pre EQ, post EQ, tweaking my delays and things before and after Dirac changing my speaker placement and all of these things to try to understand how they affect the final result. I've definitely learned a lot from all of these things.

Here is a master-list of certain tweaks and tricks I've learned so far:

1) Try to have direct speaker paths to the microphone on all of your measurements. I've found that letting the headrest (or your head) block the speakers results in a weird unnatural sound after correction.

2) when measuring, I don't recommend having the foam tip over the microphone, it seems to work better without it (caution: keep the mic protected, I usually cover it with my hand or a cloth to protect it). I also recommend pointing the microphone up and using the 90 degree calibration.

3) In my particular car,, the target curve that has worked best is a slight slope down above 200 Hertz by about -2dB, then flat from 500 Hertz to 2000hz (I have a bump at 1k), and then it dips down quite a bit above that towards 4k, and goes back up slightly at 8k-20k. The exact shape of the curve is very important, 1dB too much at one part of the Curve will sound boomy or harsh, too much of a dip will sound empty, hollow or dull.

There's definitely a learning curve to it, I'm sure I will learn a lot more as I go, this is just an early iteration of where I'm at with it. I don't have the sound completely coherent yet, so I'm figuring out how to achieve that on the speaker end of the equation, changing my speaker layout and things like that, which is so nice to be able to run Dirac in 10 minutes and have an expertly tuned set up. It speeds up the process quite a bit of learning how to get it to sound the way I want it to.

Kudos to the devteam and Dirac for making it this easy!

Andrew

What is your system and how did you set it up?

kldeetz wrote:

What is your system and how did you set it up?

Currently it is in flux but currently this is how it's set up:

MiniDSP feeds a DSP408 which goes to 4-way front speakers. 100-300hz comes from under my seats. 300-1k comes from my doors, 300-6k comes from my dash, 6k+ also comes from my dash. One 12 on each side of the trunk, one 12 behind each seat, set up as stereo subs and optimized with Dirac.

Could I set this up in my Cayman 981 2014?