Home HiFi and Measurements - branching out a little

Having used measurements and carefully tuned our speakers to sound as true-to-life as possible, we've put together a portable measurement system with a calibrated measurement mic and a high-quality USB interface, which means we can turn up at any venue, whether its a club, pub, studio or even a home HiFi system, and measure the characteristics of the speakers and room.

Once the measurements are taken, we can add a small EQ that will help your system sound as neutral and accurate as possible, or we can tune the existing EQ if one is present.

There's a huge range of applications, and we're very excited to offer this service.

- Almost all speakers have been subject to some cost-cutting measures, and often feature overly-simple crossover circuits that might not treat the drivers themselves properly. Maybe the tweeter has a bit of a peak at 6kHz, or there might be a broad dip in the lower midrange. These are difficult to fix in the crossover, often requiring a large number of components to fix a given issue, so they're often simply ignored, or counted as part of the signature sound of that product. With some EQ, the peak can be tamed and the dip filled in, giving a sound that's more natural and pleasing to the ear.

- Home HiFi speakers often suffer from placement issues, sounding bloated and muddy if they're too close to a wall. Taking out a little of the lower midrange and bass is all that's needed, and will clean the sound up dramatically.

- Taming room acoustics is a possibility, too. (Read on below)

Here's the frequency response of one of our 15" subwoofers. Normally we cut them off at 30Hz (or a little higher) when they're being used for live music, but they have no problem with being asked to go all the way down to 20Hz.

Next up, here's what happens when you put that same subwoofer in between the main speakers in a living room. That lovely flat response has been replaced with mountains!

Lets have a look at the difference between the two (below). As we can see, there's an overall gain towards the low-frequencies. The big spike at 12Hz actually fills in the response below 20Hz, but the peak at 40Hz is 10dB high, which means that, when an instrument plays through that range, a couple of the notes will be dramatically louder than the rest, giving that "one-note-bass" sound.

So, lets see what we can do with some EQ.

That's a bit better. No more one-note boom, and the bass is pretty flat down to 13Hz.