The kiddo is down for the night and my wife has gone to bed (and the dishes are even washed!), so I can now concentrate on an official report of the latest visit to Haxiom Theater.
The main event today was calibrating the subs and tweaking their in-room response with the Behringer Feedback Destroyer. Doug (dougmcbride), having the most experience calibrating subs, manned the command post and directed the calibration efforts. My brother Adam (AdamP88) and I manned the Denon 2900 and Parasound C2 remotes. I also did the button-pushing on the BFD. Lee (koiman) lent his ears and brain to assist in calibration decisions. Lee brought his wife (whom he referred to as "his navigator"), who valiantly tolerated the high levels of geekery oozing from the rest of us who were engrossed in the calibration process. When they arrived, she saw the SPL meter on the tripod and said "I know what THAT thing is! That means there's going to be loud noises."
After we took the initial readings (the blue line in the graph above), Doug broke out an online tutorial for configuring the BFD as a bass response "smoother-outer". All of us were expecting it to be a bitch and a half to set it up, but it actually went quite smoothly. It helped that the tutorial was pretty good and that I'm really great with buttons.
The great thing about the BFD is that it allows you to precisely specify which frequency you want to correct, and the bandwidth to the left and right of that frequency point you want to be affected. We ended up using 6 of the available 12 frequency filters. The results speak for themselves.
Prior to calibrating, we watched the U-571 depth charge scene. Doug noted that it sounded a bit anemic. Post-calibration, that same scene produced the chest reverberating sensation Doug was looking for. Most impressive!
I would highly recommend a BFD to anyone as a cost-effective (only $108) way of dialing in sub room response. You could easily spend more than that amount on room treatment and bass traps and not come close to the results we achieved withthe BFD.
Of course, it always helps to start with great equipment.
