AutoCal -- Use a GOOD microphone

[Shackleton]

Do you find it ironic that a lot of well-known bands use SM58s on stage?  I have you made USA and they all sound different. 

[Spankey]

Would you think that Arcam is not high end? While never previously a receiver person, my Arcam AVR600 certainly fit the bill and sounds as good and if not better than separates I have owned in the past. It comes with a microphone.

 

While I agree that treating a room as best as possible is ideal, there can still be reflections that need to be tamed and even identical speakers can vary in performance, as well as setting speaker levels. In these instances, room EQ can be very useful. Cars will always have different speakers, reflection points, etc. it may not be perfect, but auto EQ can be a useful tool for average consumers achieve better SQ.

[Shackleton]

Would you think that Arcam is not high end? While never previously a receiver person, my Arcam AVR600 certainly fit the bill and sounds as good and if not better than separates I have owned in the past. It comes with a microphone.

 

While I agree that treating a room as best as possible is ideal, there can still be reflections that need to be tamed and even identical speakers can vary in performance, as well as setting speaker levels. In these instances, room EQ can be very useful. Cars will always have different speakers, reflection points, etc. it may not be perfect, but auto EQ can be a useful tool for average consumers achieve better SQ.

I agree but myke2241 states that high end does not come with a mic. $3000 for the lower end Arcam is not cheap. wow

[tickerguy]

Do you find it ironic that a lot of well-known bands use SM58s on stage?  I have you made USA and they all sound different. 

Not at all.

 

Remember that when it comes to microphone performance what you want in a given microphone changes from use to use.  What I want for a presentation in front of a room that has a decent amount of background noise is a cardiod pattern with a low-frequency roll-off starting at about 100Hz because low-frequency energy in speech is mostly absent but rumble and rustle from things like the person's tie are not.  My point is to capture the speech accurately.

 

If I'm micing a singer I have a somewhat-similar set of desires.  If it's an acoustic instrument I may want as near to full-range response as I can get, depending on the instrument.  

 

Further, once I'm set up for a given instrument or person if I'm doing this night after night I will damn you to hell if you CHANGE the microphone that I've been using, because I know how it sounds, I have the board set up for it and I know exactly where everything should be.  You change that and I have to go back and do it all over again.

 

All I'm saying here is that the MC20 stinks pretty badly and a better microphone will return better results as determined by my empirical experience.

[tickerguy]

The AT822 is a stereo XY which always uses a pair card or hyper card. when you cal something you need to cal from a single point omni mic because they don't have any proximity effect and reproduce freq content accurately in any give space. I don't know if you ever have looked at freq curves for mics. i don't know anyone would consider AT822 flat or almost  http://www.microphone-data.com/microphones/at822/!!! it is also not very sensitive and has a very low output. 

 

 

 

I think you have a misconception of what a "high end receiver" is. There is just no such thing. when i here high end receiver i think audiophile. ask any one of those audiophile guys if they EQ inserted their playback chain or if a mic came with any of their components. the answer will be no. the proper approach would be treat your room and then make adjustments to your playback system. As far as i know there are not too many hifi EQ's out there. Pioneer makes low end consumer stereo products that appeal to people that one box that does it all. jack of all trades master of none. when you cal a room like that it limits the performance of monitors. your not getting accurate playback. your room would sound 1000 times better it you properly treated it for standing freqs and took the time to understand what your receiver is actually doing and how it cals the system. 

 

 

 

You are slightly incorrect. the freq response of the rear speakers doesn't change at all. The rear are usually placed in a high absorption area, low to between the front and rear seats. so you have a perceived sense that your speaker produce not enough high end. you may have some resonate freqs inside the door but really come on, if your concerned about that your music is either too loud which you wouldn't even hear that issue or you have the cheapest POS car in the world! honestly if that is of great concern you should treat your car doors. acoustic conditions will constantly change in a car. 

 

as i said before i am very confident in my ears as i use them every day to make a living. personally i think auto EQ is a waste of time. 

This is kind-of correct right up until the last sentence

 

The response of auto speakers is grossly influenced by the door (or other surface) they're mounted in.  It is basically impossible to properly match a speaker to the "enclosure" in a car (where the "enclosure" is the door or trunk) because you don't control the volume of the cavity (you get handed that) and you usually can't change it with absorption material in the door itself (most of the time you can't use absorption material in the cavity space at all.)  What you can (and should) do is try to isolate to the greatest possible extent the rear wave from entering the listening space, and that can usually be accomplished to some degree.

 

In addition doors are full of things that have resonance frequencies and while you can add dampening to the panels (and should) to dull them you can't do that to everything that has a resonance frequency (which would be pretty-much anything made out of a hard material in there.)  This inherently muddies the sound.  Car speaker companies don't generally make sealed-back drivers because doing so for low frequencies requires a very large driver and they won't fit.  As a result the assumption they are more or less forced to make is that the mounting surface is a flat panel with no resonance, the surface represents an infinite baffle with infinite compliance and no pathway for the back wave to reach the listening position.  All three assumptions are false in an actual car door.  While the interior of a car is a fairly-absorptive environment the  interior of a door itself is NOT.

 

The problem is exacerbated by the front and rear doors being of different volumes and having different resonances, even if you use the same speakers in both.

 

Then you add the fact that head units standing alone have one set of EQ controls for both front and rear rather than separate EQ -- unless you put a digital processor between the head unit and amp.

 

The "auto eq" function, properly implemented, gives you that processor.  What it doesn't (unfortunately) give you is the ability to manually adjust things instead of accepting its idea of "right."  If you want that you're going to have to buy an outboard unit because I've yet to see a head unit that exposes that to manual user setting (I wish it did!)

 

As for observations on the mic and receivers he's right.  Pioneer makes middle-of-the road and low-end consumer audio gear.  You may think differently, but you're wrong. 

 

But -- even a low or middle-of-the-road system, set up properly, will blow a high end system out of the water where the person setting it up and optimizing the room to the extent possible doesn't know what he's doing.

 

The NEX auto-eq works very well for what it is provided you have a decent full-range omni mic to feed it and a decent set of speakers to produce the sound.  It's not perfect but it beats manual adjustment because it can (and does) separately EQ the front and rear channels which cannot be manually done in the head unit.

[dallastt]

So I just tried it w/ a better powered mic. It did not reverse the phase on the sub, but it still turned it down to -11 .  I changed the settings on the crossover, and the sub, but left the rest the same.  I'm going to give it some time to see if I like it. I also want to use my Dayton Mic to RTA it w/ my settings vs the auto eq settings. I'll post up the results. 

 

I had ordered the Pioneer mic though amazon, but I'm going to send it back, I forgot I had an ATR-3350 laying around. 

 

http://www.audio-technica.com/cms/wired_mics/9c6eca17168eef6f/

[jhren]

If you're going to run an RTA application, best to use a calibrated mic and load the calibration file into the RTA application to compensate for mic response deficiencies.

 

The mic you linked only has a freeq of 50-18k.  You have to remember those range values are the 3dB down points at the end of a freeq plot, from mean response value (0dB), and they continue to roll off outside that range.  On top of that, the dB swing could be all over the place in between the range values.

[dallastt]

If you're going to run an RTA application, best to use a calibrated mic and load the calibration file into the RTA application to compensate for mic response deficiencies.

 

The mic you linked only has a freeq of 50-18k.  You have to remember those range values are the 3dB down points at the end of a freeq plot, from mean response value (0dB), and they continue to roll off outside that range.  On top of that, the dB swing could be all over the place in between the range values.

 

 

The mic I used for RTA comes w/a  calibration file for the iPhone.  I loaded it up to my phone. It's a different mic than I used for the Auto EQ.  

 

 

Also is this not better than the Pioneer mic? 

[jhren]

The mic I used for RTA comes w/a  calibration file for the iPhone.  I loaded it up to my phone. It's a different mic than I used for the Auto EQ.  

 

 

Also is this not better than the Pioneer mic? 

Can't say for certain.  I'd guess yes... but a guess is all it would be.  Would need more info and listening tests to draw a definitive conclusion.

[Mattk11]

So, has anyone determined a good microphone to use with the NEX's?

[Peta]

I'm also curious what to use.

[ScottinPollock]

I used the mic that came with my SC-07, which appears to be the same as the accessory mic offered.

 

And while I was a big fan of what MCACC did for my system connected to the SC-07, the NEX Auto-Cal failed miserably. It got the time alignment wrong, sub phase wrong (which is not surprising given the time measurement issues), and the levels, crossover points, and slopes were far from ideal.

 

So... IMHO, nomatter what mic you use, if you use autocal as your starting point you are doomed to failure.

[Blackforge]

Recently tried out the mic intended for my Denon Audyssey calibration with my NEX-8100.  I put it facing forward hanging slightly off the top of the drivers seat.  It did much better than the Pioneer mic.  Mids are no longer tuned out like before when using a flat EQ setting.  It resembles a lot closer to my previously manually adjusted tune, but seems to have tuned the frequencies I was struggling with in between some bands from before.