SMART THINKING
SUPERCALIBRATIONS FUSS-FREE SING THE PRAISES OF MOUNTS DIRAC LIVE Dirac Live room correction means happier clients for home audio argues integrator Supercalibrations.
Black Series’ TV mounts, are so well conceived the TV is usually up on the wall within 30 minutes.
Dallas Dingle has specialised in high-end home audio (as a hobby and a profession) for more than 40 years. Founder of St. Paul, Minn.-based Supercalibrations, Dallas has done it all, from building his own loudspeakers, to home cinema installations, to commercial work. Supercalibrations was also a founding member of CEDIA. And in all those years, Dallas says one challenge has remained the same. “Trying to get speakers to sound like they’re supposed to in a room has always been a quagmire,” he says. “Even in my own home, I’ve been willing to put up whatever acoustical treatments it takes. There were times I still couldn’t quite get the sound I wanted.” That changed when Dallas discovered Dirac Live. Now he doesn’t consider a job finished until he’s calibrated a client’s listening space using Dirac Live. “Even in dedicated rooms built for listening to music or watching movies,” Dallas says. “Because in reality, 99% of rooms where you put speakers— even finely tuned environments with acoustic treatments—the room’s going to affect the sound. But even there, Dirac Live makes a huge difference. It can correct for a room with poor acoustics, or it can be used as that final tool for taking a room
that already sounds pretty good and turning it into something even better.” Dirac Live achieves this by using algorithms to analyse and reduce the sound colorations introduced by a room. It’s tunable to the listener’s preference and because installers can run it on a laptop, they enjoy the flexibility of having speakers in one room and the receiver in another. “In our business, we also make our own speakers, and we don’t have to worry about finetuning our speaker sound quite so much,” Dallas explains. “Because with Dirac Live overlaid on top, you’re going to get a great result.”
GREAT MUSIC IN CHALLENGING SPACES
Over the years, Dallas has seen what many other installers have seen: the design of residential spaces that actually hinders audio performance. Even in dedicated home cinemas, Dallas and his technicians use Dirac Live to optimise the sound, not unlike the growing number of professional producers and musicians who use the solution in studios to ensure they hear their mix accurately, without room impact.
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52 MARCH 2022
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