I wonder why it's taking so long to put Dirac ART on anything other than Storm processors. It was supposed to be offered to Monoprice and Denon and Marantz and I know for a fact there are beta testers on all 3 brands.
I'm curious to what is taking so long.
We can only speculate the reasons, mine would be:
- The D+M AVRs and AVPs, while all have the same DSP IC that is more "powerful" than the one used in earlier models, it likely would still be limited and might be the bottleneck that D+M has to deal with in order to deal with the MIPS and FLOPS, probably have to collaborate with Dirac Live who might have to optimize its algorithm to improve efficiency. Understandably it would be a little harder for the AV10 and AVR-A1H, because it has a few more channels than the lower AV20 and AVR-A10H.
- DL had quite a bit of bug fix updated after their launch of DLBC, ART, being "active" would likely be a more lengthy process in the bug discovering/fixing beta stage.
- The likes of Trinnov and Storm are multiple times more expensive gear so they understandably would have higher priority for the development teams to deal with those issues, they also are dealing with much fewer devices, vs D+M, Onkyo, Arcam, NAD etc.
Below clearly shows the A1H (AV10 is the same, if you can find the flow diagram), has the same single DSP IC as the AVRs that have fewer channels. So, logically, once they've got those two flagship models sorted, the AVRs will have ART ready too.
I really don't quite understand why people seem to want ART so much. In my opinion, and based on my educated guess, for most home applications one will not notice much difference, let alone better as those who don't mind spending such extra dollars will likely have at least two capable subwoofers and front row speakers, so in such cases, DLBC can already do a great job in smoothing the bass response, and as we all know, based on Dr. Olive and Toole's studies, RC/EQ above 300-500 Hz really won't much a whole lot of difference, and again, let alone better. That's just me take, obviously, but I would be happy with an AV10 or AV20, without ART.