[JohnR]

I guess my point is that if you EQ it out, why would you try to address it with treatment?  This would say make the difference between a 2" or a 4-6" reflection panel decision.

Measurement and being able to find what is causing each problem absolutely let's you bring a much more targeted approach to treating a space.

Bryan

It sounds like we're in agreement then - what kind of argument is this anyway?

In my living room, side-wall reflections are not an issue, because of placement, and because I use dipoles. What is an issue is decay times, which are not actually bad but could be improved in the 70-250 Hz range. From what I understand, what's required there is nothing more than slabs of acoustic damping in the room, preferably away from the walls. If I had gone with the "treat first, EQ later" mantra (with by extension not measuring until realizing that you can't do EQ without it) I would have spent a lot of effort/money on things like panels, without addressing the actual problem.

As an aside, I suppose I should add that I'm not all that excited by "room correction EQ" per se, but more as part of the overall design including crossover and the speaker design.

[Ethan Winer]

Yes of course, which is why you measure in a number of locations in the desired listening area and average. Is there something wrong with that approach?

The more you average, the less overall correction you get. Again, this is easy for everyone to assess for themselves just by measuring. Not measuring using the tools built into Audyssey (or whatever), but measuring independently at the same multiple locations before and after applying EQ.

It looks terrible, even with all the traps - why don't you use EQ to flatten it out? (Or did I miss something?)

Yes, unsmoothed data always looks terrible, especially in a small room, even with lots of bass traps. The graphs in the second article I linked look more normal because they're displayed with more sensible graph settings. Also, the waterfalls are more telling than the raw response graphs.

--Ethan

[bpape]

It sounds like we're in agreement then - what kind of argument is this anyway?

In my living room, side-wall reflections are not an issue, because of placement, and because I use dipoles. What is an issue is decay times, which are not actually bad but could be improved in the 70-250 Hz range. From what I understand, what's required there is nothing more than slabs of acoustic damping in the room, preferably away from the walls. If I had gone with the "treat first, EQ later" mantra (with by extension not measuring until realizing that you can't do EQ without it) I would have spent a lot of effort/money on things like panels, without addressing the actual problem.

As an aside, I suppose I should add that I'm not all that excited by "room correction EQ" per se, but more as part of the overall design including crossover and the speaker design.

Ummmm.  That's not making a lot of sense to me John - sorry. You say on one hand you need slabs of absorption to address decay time but treatment first then EQ would have wasted time and money?  How is EQ going to address decay time only without frequency?  Panels are in many cases slabs of absorption.  If FR is not a problem, why would one EQ at all?  I guess that's my point. If you can get there via placement and judicious treatment, why EQ?  And why EQ any more than necessary if it can be resolved mostly by the previous?  If you had say 6 problem frequencies and you can address 5 of them via placement and treatment, would you really want 6 bands of EQ or would 1 be more appropriate and less signal processing?

Bryan

[JohnR]

Whoops, I take that back 

I think you misread my post - I didn't say that EQ addresses decay time at all.