I had the day off yesterday so I decided to run Dirac since if I had any questions or issues I would be able to call Emotiva. I usually do things with my setup on the weekends since that's when I have free time and I invariably run into issues and can't get any assistance as most companies don't work weekends.
So I sat down with my OLD WindowsXP Toshiba laptop and had a go. I do wish that the cable that the mic came with was a few feet longer as I was trying to stay out of the living room while the test tones were running. I wasn't quite able to do this with the cable but I don't think there were any issues. I also used my boom mic stand from my Rock Band video game days to hold the mic. Unfortunately the boom wasn't long enough for me to have the stand behind the couch so I had to have the stand in front of the mic for the testing. I don't think this was an issue though.
With Dirac you first set up the input gain and vloume level for your speakers. You have to turn the input gain so that the ambient noise in your room is around -24db as heard by the mic. Then you have to play a sample test tone through each of your speakers to keep them all in a small green zone so that you don't get any clipping in the tones. I had a little bit of an issue getting all of my speakers in the "green" zone as my front left seemed to be much louder than all of the other speakers. I was able to get the left front to just below clipping while having a few of the other speakers at the very bottom of the green range. Ran through the tones for each speaker and then thought my computer had hung up because it just sat there processing. After about 5 minutes with seemingly no progress I called up Emotiva for help. I had only 3 green dots at the listening positions. Emo tech thought that something was wrong and that I should run the tones again. Ugh. But while being on the phone I noticed that I suddenly had 6 green dots. So it turned out that my laptop's processor was just really slow. I let it run and it finally finished doing all of it's computations after about 20 minutes.
I disconnected everything and then sat down to listen. I definitely like the results. I won't say that it is "night and day" but it is a noticeable difference. I didn't realize how "congested" my fronts sounded before Dirac. I thought my speakers sounded pretty good before but all of the sound before the correction was coming from directly between the front speakers. With Dirac the soundstage has spread out a bit. Sound seems to be coming from the sides of the speakers more. t is an interesting sensation. Also the bass from my subs seems a little cleaner and more authoritative. I had the subs set to "Dual Mono" in the XMC. There is some concern on the Emotiva forum over how Dirac handles multiple subwoofers but it seemed to do just fine in my set up.
The UMC-1 was my first stand alone processor and I was astounded at the sound quality between it and the Yamaha receiver I had been using previously. One thing that really caught my attention was when watching the movie Iron Man. In the scene where Tony Stark is demo'ing the Jericho missile to the military there is a metallic clang when the larger missile is flying and breaks up into smaller missiles. I never heard that sound with my receiver. After selling the UMC and going to a Marantz processor I watched that scene and didn't hear that clank as clearly. I was disappointed. I also didn't her that clank with the XMC-1 initially. Well I am happy to say that after Dirac, the clank is back.
I haven't spent much time with the system with X-mas and all but so far I think that Dirac and the XMC-1 have definitely been worth the wait.
Here are a few wishes I would have for Dirac and Emotiva.
1. Longer cable for the microphone.
2. I wish that Dirac would group all of the listening points together by height. It was a bit of a pain to move my boom up and down between the higher and lower listening points. If you could just measure all of the high points and low points together it would simplify the process.
One tip I would give to people, make sure your laptop has a fast processor. I would say the whole process took me about an hour but about 20 minutes of that time was just the filter processing time taken by my slow computer. I am actually surprised that my laptop had
ZERO issues running Dirac since it is so old. But everything worked on the first try.
Here are the graphs with what Dirac heard and calculated for corrections for my speakers
Fronts
Center
Surrounds
Backs
Left sub
Right sub
