Room treatments are always better than electronical trickery, however getting a room "perfect" is nearly impossible. But, some things can't ever be fixed by electronic room correction, or at least not without causing other problems... So a combination of the two is a great fix. If you can truly fix some of the big hitters in your particular room (echo is a big one for most), then you also tend to tame some of the room modes, which in turn make electronic correction much better and with fewer compromises.

I only have experience with 2 room corrections. MCACC from Pioneer, which honestly is a joke. I currently use Audyssey XT32 and it is really good, but I have heard that Dirac is amazing. (Then again, for $725 USD for the 8 channel software plus needing to buy a $100+ microphone for room measurements, it better sound good. They do have a 14 day trial if you have a microphone already to give it a shot.) With Atmos and DTS:X I am not sure how critical it is to have correction for all speakers in a 7.2.4 setup as they currently don't have that level, but I am sure that pretty soon they will.

Home Theater Geeks just posted a video about Dirac. It gets mixed "reviews" from the viewers, and I haven't watched it yet, but.... here is the link to the video


Farewell - June 4, 2020