TOPIC:

Hypex amp + notoriously bright speakers. What can be done to "warm" things up?

Sure - nothing to stop you interposing a miniDSP (with or without Dirac) between your source and amp and adjusting the overall balance of your system. That's effectively what I do - I build multi-drive active speakers to my own design and use miniDSP (with Dirac) to adjust their "voicing". The ability to define a "target curve" in Dirac and have the Dirac software create the filters makes this a very easy way to achieve what you are looking for.

Do you mean by just running the dirac measurements and applying the resulting curve, or are there specific things I can do on top of that to "warm" up the system?

Kenken wrote:

Do you mean by just running the dirac measurements and applying the resulting curve, or are there specific things I can do on top of that to "warm" up the system?

The simplest way is to do the Dirac measurements and apply a target curve.

As I am generally trying to integrate the sound across 2 or more drivers, what I tend to do is to measure (using REW) the response of the speaker with no filters other than the crossover filters, and then use PEQ filters on each of the outputs to adjust for a reasonably smooth overall response curve, and then apply Dirac once that is done, but TBH there isn't a lot to choose performance-wise between what I do and just using Dirac as is.

The magic is in the choice of target curve - the software will give you a vanilla default target curve, but I tend to use one based on the Harmann curve - basically, it  gives a bit of bass boost and a bit of treble cut, so may well do the kind of "warming up" that you are looking for. I've also experimented with creating target curves based on the published FR curves of commercial speakers, which is mildly amusing, but I tend to come back to the Harmann curve because it works well to my ears.

Hmm but looks like harman curve accentuates the highs, no?
 

No. It accentuates the bass and reduces the treble.

What can be achieved will partly depend what the cause of the speakers sounding bright is. If it's simply a tonal balance issue then PEQ can compensate for this, and personally I'd use this in preference to Dirac Live. If the real problem is associated with a tweeter resonance or other distortion then EQ won't be able to address this and so the results will be less good.