can someone please break this down for me as to the good and bad sides of these magic boxes.if you can tune your room and speakers with this,why does it not sell like hot cakes ???? thks for any words....
Bad side is cost. It is like any active design, you need multiple amps. Also...they are not magic. Don't buy into the marketing too much because there isn't much that can be done in the electronic domain for many room acoustic problems. Even if you had a magic wand and could remove reflections, the research isn't real clear on what to remove and what to leave.
I think they are a good tool, but they can really be misused by people who don't understand what they are doing. Designing a speaker is a lot more complex than getting a smooth on-axis response. Knowing where drivers are best to use takes some knowledge of their dispersion characteristics and their relative distortion at a given bandwidth. Those are things that most end-users don't necessarily understand.
Basically, if you know how to design a speaker using traditional technology, these tools can help you design a better (and more expensive) one because of the power of the DSP. They give you some equalization tools to use on the low frequency stuff and they allow you to use much steeper slopes than you can with purely analog tools.
