I've been tormenting myself for two years trying to come up with a solution to my house with very bad acoustics.
The funny thing is, a perfectly good solution would be something like this but only if it could be preset and ideally controlled with a remote control.
What I'm visualizing is a DSP filter that could do a 1-2dB per octave lowpass filter, beginning around 1khz. So that the output at 125Hz would be reduced by 6dB, 62.5Hz would be reduced by 8dB, etc.
This would be a nice way to solve the battling needs of my wife and I:
1) I work all day long, and about the only time I get a chance to watch a movie or a TV show is around 8-9pm
2) My wife and kids go to bed around 10pm
3) I'm often up until midnight or 2am
Obviously I've been trying to solve the problem by obsessing over speaker directivity. But all I really need is to reduce the amount of sound radiated upstairs by about 10dB. And my speakers are already directional down to about 1khz.
Whenever I'm upstairs and they're watching a movie, the things that "jump out at me" are always low frequency effects. Like, they'll be watching some horror movie where the dialog is 80dB and then there's a jump scare in the movie where the SPL blasts to 100dB at low frequency.
If I threw a compressor into the mix, that would take it a step further (though I'm reluctant to use a compressor.)
Now I just need to find a DSP with a remote control...
MiniDSP SHD allows you to draw the house curve you want in its Dirac function. It then does multi-point measurements to fit your actual response to the desired curve.
I am glad that this information is useful... I was concerned that it might be too obvious... like telling folks that 3 + 4 = 7
I have learned something from almost every post as well...
A mind blowing DSP game-changer for me has been the Q-Sys platform. It would be difficult for me to overstate the flexibility is offers, and the education acceleration regarding active processing that the flexibility provides.
The filter you visualize would be trivial to implement, and put onto a custom remote. By custom remote, I mean any iOS device or PC.
Q-Sys is open architecture, which means you build the processing design and signal flow routing/components you want with software on your PC or MAC, and then place it into a hardware Core that compiles and runs the design.
ANY control element in the design running on the Core, can be placed into a custom remote for real time control.
And/or, ANY combination of control settings/filters/whatever, can be put into presets for simple switching between them.
Presets (or continuously variable control) of the low shelf you want.
The percentage knob i showed in a previous post controlling the downward tilt angle was on my remote for a while.
(That one knob controlled all the shelving filters simultaneously in real time, to make the various downward house-curve slopes.)
Here's the wi-fi remote I currently have on a touch screen PC, for a 3 channel LCR setup.
The buttons across the top are presets for comparing 2ch stereo to various mono to various 3ch matrix settings.
The level controls are what they appear, volume controls for the 5-way sections (what i mentioned i prefer over the variable tilt control)
The delay times in the lower right accept keyboard input.
I usually have multiple instance of this remote running on multiple PCs, so I can control the system from the listening room, or down the hall in my office.
(You could give a remote to your wife too...and you guys could duel it out Lol !!!)
Admittedly Q-Sys is waay overboard solution for getting just a low shelving remote !
But again, nothing in audio apart from leaning to measure, has given me as much ease, and results, and plain learning, for speaker building/processing . fwiw