NickBr

Hi Richard, Thank you for the warm welcome to the thread. I think you and I are in agreement regarding the measuring positions. I feel that the more compact array of positions for the chair set up will provide a more precise result for the single listener scenario. Perhaps the ideal would be to have two filters, one for chair the other for sofa and switch in and out as the company dictates I agree too that the blobs on a chair are not particularly helpful and this is why I chose to take note of the head position advice in the manual, with in between points it was pretty simple to arrive at 9 positions with a good spread. As you say there seem to be multiple ways of achieving good results. I feel it is good to have these different ways that may work better in differing situations. I feel now, for the first time, I'm hearing just what my Zu speakers can do ..... especially in the low end. Something that would have been pretty difficult without IRC and Amarra. The little niggles and bug bears pale into the distance when the music starts to play Talking of niggles ..... has anyone else experienced problems after switching between filters ? I have found that when I do this Amarra will sometimes quit unexpectedly and then when restarted all filters are no longer present in the IRC window. Thanks to all Nick (I had to add the Br to get a unique name )

Hi everyone, As a long time lurker and recent adopter both of Amarra and computer audio in general I thought it about time to jump right in and get involved in the discussion. I think its funny how we all read the same manual and interpret the text in differing ways, the wonders of subjectivity at work. Regarding the microphone positioning. The manual states for the breadth of measurements "it is important to spread out the microphone positions in a sphere at least 1 meter of diameter". The way I read this and implemented it in my measurements was to imagine a large gym ball (1 meter diameter) sitting in my chair. If the centre of the ball is the first position i.e. the sweetspot listening position then the maximum distance between the first position and any of the others will 0.5 meter. Nowhere near the 3' that people are mentioning in this thread which I personally feel is too much for optimisation of the chair mode of correction. Another line in the manual would, in my mind, tend to reinforce this idea "in general it is important to collect measurements in the most likely listeners head positions (sitting,standing,leaning forward etc)". If we sit in our normal listening position then these positions can be quickly ascertained and tend to sit in that 1 meter bubble. I did a first run very quickly upon receiving the software and XTZ mic and got a reasonable result. For my second attempt I made a drawing, based on the 1 meter sphere and tied in with the suggested head positions, with measurements identical from the sweetspot for opposite points in the suggested positions. This produced to my ears a better result. I'm in no way saying I have this totally correct but it has worked pretty well for me. The resulting filter certainly smoothed out the low end in my room but I did end up raising the 20Hz point on my filter by +1.5db as I felt some of the low end warmth had been lost. Doing this did indeed bring back that warmth without introducing problems of boom or accentuation. With regard to microphone burn in I am a little sceptical I'm afraid. The XTZ that I bought is sold as a calibrated microphone which to me means it leaves the factory checked and adjusted to work within a set of defined parameters. I can't imagine how they could calibrate something based on a non defined 8 hour burn in, for instance how would they know what material or volume a user would employ during burn in and the effect on the microphone ? This I feel would result in inconsistencies between supposedly consistent pieces of equipment. Each to their own on this subject I guess but I personally am not going to sweat it with worrying about burn in. I would like to thank everyone who has contributed to this thread it has been both interesting and informative. I like the way all points of view have been considered and accepted whether agreed with or not, so rare on fora these days