I started my HiFi journey in the land of car audio. It's an interesting world, filled mostly with your average head unit and door speaker upgrade. Very few, if any people take it much further than that.
I've taken my car quite far, with multiple amplifiers and a completely active setup based on an Audiotech Fischer DSP, the HELIX DSP PRO MK2 specifically.
Some of its features:
- Nearly infinitely customizable 32 band 0.25db parametric EQ per channel
- Time alignment down to 0.005ms per channel
- Phase alignment in increments of 5.625 degrees per channel
- Active crossovers per channel, offering Butterworth, Bessel, Linkwitz-Riley,and Chebyshev filters, with slopes between -6 to -42 dB/oct depending on the filter.
You can almost completely compensate for any and all speaker placement imperfections with this DSP.
You can download the demo of their tuning software to see what else it can do.
I have not been able to find a home theater targeted product that comes close to this level of functionality.
The MiniDSP SHD series is the closest I've found, but they appear to not even be in the same ballpark.
Does anyone know of any products that would compare?
I've taken my car quite far, with multiple amplifiers and a completely active setup based on an Audiotech Fischer DSP, the HELIX DSP PRO MK2 specifically.
Some of its features:
- Nearly infinitely customizable 32 band 0.25db parametric EQ per channel
- Time alignment down to 0.005ms per channel
- Phase alignment in increments of 5.625 degrees per channel
- Active crossovers per channel, offering Butterworth, Bessel, Linkwitz-Riley,and Chebyshev filters, with slopes between -6 to -42 dB/oct depending on the filter.
You can almost completely compensate for any and all speaker placement imperfections with this DSP.
You can download the demo of their tuning software to see what else it can do.
I have not been able to find a home theater targeted product that comes close to this level of functionality.
The MiniDSP SHD series is the closest I've found, but they appear to not even be in the same ballpark.
Does anyone know of any products that would compare?
That is a good point actually that I never considered. Now I'm slapping myself for not thinking of that. For some reason I was thinking of home theater and car audio as their own domains, but a DSP processed signal is still a DSP processed signal.
I would have thought there was a home theater targeted option available with similar, or better functionality, and a 120/240V input.
I guess when you have much more flexibility for speaker placement in a home theater, you wouldn't likely need that extensive configuration available on a processor, but it is still fascinating to put speakers in conventionally incorrect configurations and be able to correct for it.
Only limitation would be that I'd need a small 12 V power supply to run it, but a simple 5 amp 12 V power supply is fairly common.
Now it's surprising me that more people aren't using these as a processor.
I would have thought there was a home theater targeted option available with similar, or better functionality, and a 120/240V input.
I guess when you have much more flexibility for speaker placement in a home theater, you wouldn't likely need that extensive configuration available on a processor, but it is still fascinating to put speakers in conventionally incorrect configurations and be able to correct for it.
Only limitation would be that I'd need a small 12 V power supply to run it, but a simple 5 amp 12 V power supply is fairly common.
Now it's surprising me that more people aren't using these as a processor.
From the specs of the Helix, 510mA is the current draw so you won't need such a big PSU as 5A. I'd recommend a linear wall-wart (not a switcher) as the IOs are all single-ended.
When I was looking around for home DSP I eventually saw what is available for car sound - indeed way more than for home audio.
