(June 9, 2023) Dirac is hot and heavy early in this month's news cycle, with big announcements by several AV brands and a large manufacturer of portable devices.
The long wait for StormAudio's official rollout of Dirac's Active Room Treatment, or ART, is nearly over. This morning, the high-end AV manufacturer took to social media and told customers that ART will go live this coming Monday (June 12). Beta testing has been ongoing since the two companies announced their exclusive partnership for the first few quarters of 2023, with testing expanding to a larger group of owners during May. ART is born from nearly 15 years of car audio research and Dirac’s use of Multiple Input/Multiple Output (MIMO) mixed-phase impulse response. The company’s first commercial MIMO-enhanced product, Dirac Dimension, was employed by BMW and Rolls Royce to give passengers access to a “more spacious” audio experience. Years later, a second version called Dirac Unison honed impulse response alignment within a car’s cabin, essentially allowing every speaker to contribute to each individual speaker’s output capabilities.
Dirac says ART brings those automotive technologies to the home theater environment but with a focus on low frequencies. The reasoning behind a frequency limitation is speaker position variability. ART-like technologies can correct up to 4kHz within a car's cabin because speaker positions are consistently fixed and known. Home theater environments are far less predictable and widely varied, which has led Dirac to limit ART’s application to 300 Hz and below (ART will only correct up to 150 Hz at launch). It isn't a standalone product but a third layer to the Dirac Live experience. Users will still need to employ Dirac Live and Bass Control to manage both impulse response and subwoofer integration. ART only enters the picture to attack decay and reverb. The technology is capable of using every speaker, from bookshelf models to full-sized floorstanders, to achieve overall effectiveness.
Not to be outdone, Premium Audio Company's AVR brands, Elite, Integra, Pioneer, and Onkyo, are gaining access to Dirac Live Bass Control. Owners of Integra's DRX-8.4, Elite's VSX-LX805 (Buy it on Amazon), Pioneer's VSA-LX805, and Onkyo's TX-RZ70 can get Bass Control for an add-on fee of $349 (single-subwoofer version) and $499 (multi-subwoofer version). Bass Control helps owners manage their subwoofers by aggregating measurement and location data from each subwoofer to determine how a system’s bass is distributed throughout the room. It then identifies inconsistencies in the low-frequency response and compensates to distribute bass evenly throughout the room. It also corrects for the time alignment of subwoofers with the main speaker pair, assuring that the entire spectrum of audio is accurately reproduced. All of this processing enables the subwoofers to be positioned anywhere in the room – wherever most aesthetically pleasing – without sacrificing performance for design or vice versa.
And lastly, Dirac and ASUS, a global innovator of phones, computers, and electronics, have announced an expansion of their partnership to integrate Dirac Virtuo spatial audio solution into the new ROG Phone 7 (Buy it on Amazon) series of gaming smartphones and Vivobook (Buy it on Amazon) and ExpertBook (Buy it on Amazon) series of laptops. Virtuo enables a high-resolution spatial and immersive sound experience by creating a spacious, natural soundscape beyond the physical confines of the sound system with accurate sound localization.
For smartphones and laptops – like the ROG Phone 7, the Vivobook, and the ExpertBook – Dirac Virtuo enables immersive sound from the device’s built-in speakers while enhancing the speakers’ overall sound quality. The solution compensates for the shortcomings of small speakers to enhance their acoustic performance dramatically while also creating a soundstage much wider than the device itself – enabling exceptional immersion for gaming, movies, music, and more without requiring multi-channel or object-based content types.
For headphones connected to the ROG Phone 7, Virtuo employs a high-resolution binaural impulse response technology to restore speaker crosstalk and correct the stereo soundstage. Sound seemingly comes from a pair of premium stereo speakers in front of the listener, rather than from inside their head – creating a truer, more accurate, and immersive stereo soundstage than standard headphones can deliver.
Related Reading
- THX's CEO and Global Head of Mobile Technology Talk Spatial Audio on AV NIRVANA Live, June 6 at 4pm ET
- StormAudio Joins Forces with Dirac and Perlisten to Showcase Home Theater Perfection at High End Munich 2023
- Game Changer! Dirac Officially Unveils Active Room Treatment (ART) Technology
- Onkyo's Latest Receiver Raises the Bar, Meet the Flagship TX-RZ70
- Pioneer Elite Makes Massive Statement with New Flagship Receiver, VSX-LX805
