At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas this week, Swedish digital audio pioneer Dirac is launching Dirac Live Active Room Treatment, the latest in its family of solutions designed to address bass resonance and room decay time to produce a cleaner, tighter bass experience in home theaters and home entertainment spaces.
Dirac Live Active Room Treatment will debut in all StormAudio AVRs through a Spring 2023 firmware update.
“Dirac pioneered digital room correction through our impulse response optimization technology found in our acclaimed Dirac Live Room Correction feature,” stated Mathias Johansson, Dirac’s chief product officer. “Now, with Active Room Treatment we are moving beyond traditional room correction to actually reduce bass decay times digitally, without needing bass traps or thick layers of wall absorption.”
Dirac Live Active Room Treatment leverages Dirac’s expertise in MIMO mixed-phase impulse response correction technology to enable spatial optimization, whereby all speakers in a sound system cooperate with each other to accomplish what passive acoustic treatments struggle to achieve. With decay times reduced digitally and automatically, listeners experience clear sound devoid of “boomy,” smeared bass — as if the room itself didn’t exist.
Until now, managing bass response and room reflections required physical sound dampeners to be installed on the walls or other areas. In contrast, Dirac Live Active Room Treatment works much like the popular Active Noise Cancellation technology, using the system’s own speakers to actively cancel out unwanted wavelengths originating from other speakers. This is achieved by measuring the entire setup as a unified system, instead of targeting each speaker individually, and applying advanced spatial optimization to the entire system based on the needs of each unique room.
In many listening spaces, like home entertainment rooms, it can take a long time for bass to decay — or stop bouncing around the room — resulting in ringing or booming. Dirac Live Active Room Treatment automatically evaluates and adjusts the bass characteristics of the entire system, leveraging the strengths of each speaker to make up for any shortcomings in other speakers. This effectively turns passive speakers into active support units, strengthening the overall system.
“By actively optimizing and coordinating bass response characteristics from all the speakers in a system, our latest Dirac Live feature reduces decay times to provide an incredibly dense and transparent audio experience in any room,” Johansson added.
Dirac Live Active Room Treatment complements the company’s existing Dirac Live features — Dirac Live Room Correction and Dirac Live Bass Control — to improve sound performance in any listening area. It can be used in any system with more than one speaker, with progressive performance enhancements based on the total speakers in the system. The more speakers a system has, the greater the effect of the spatial optimization.
“Passive treatments for controlling low-end resonances have been around for years, but they’re not necessarily effective and require physical changes to the listening area, so most people don’t use them,” Johansson continued. “Dirac Live Active Room Treatment is the only solution available that reduces room decay time for a much clearer and tighter bass. StormAudio recognizes the transformative power of this world’s first technology and we look forward to its debut in Spring 2023.”
Dirac Live Active Room Treatment will be included, at no additional fee, in all StormAudio Processors and AVRs ordered from January 1, 2023 onward and will be made available through a firmware update in Spring 2023. StormAudio products ordered before January 1 will be upgradeable with Dirac Live Active Room Treatment after the Spring 2023 firmware update and by purchasing a license from Dirac’s online store at $299.
“We have been a close Dirac partner since 2017 and have always been a pioneer in implementing their cutting-edge technologies successfully,” explained Olivier Thumerel, StormAudio’s CEO. “We were the first to introduce the Dirac Live Bass Control in 2020 and are now proud to be leading again with the release of Dirac Live Active Room Treatment. Our users have always praised the performance and results of calibrating with Dirac tools on our platform, and now we are able to raise it to the next level again in partnership with Dirac.”
Dirac will be demonstrating the Dirac Live Active Room Treatment feature at CES 2023 in its private suite at the Venetian Hotel.
