Now the Harman Curve, from the Dirac view, doesn’t look like it should present the same way. It is more visible in the REW vs Dirac displays, but I sense explains what I was hearing. But Dirac sees that fall off and, in its standard curve, pushes the top end back up again. That felt like best raw listening across balance and sound stage. Strikes me that the top end of the raw curve falls away because the tweeter is slightly off axis given speakers are toe-in about half-way between straight ahead and to listening position. The taming of the bottom and mid-range is clear, along with an overall lowering in SPL – but relative to that you can see the contribution of the top end actually increasing. The first graph below shows the raw measurement in grey, with the Dirac Standard adjusted curve in red. These were using both speakers on, Pink PN across about 50 averages with microphone moved through about the same area as covered by the Dirac 9‑point sampling. I then took some measurements through REW. First look at the Dirac projections you can see the ‘taming’ of the bass and mid-range, but the brighter top end is less immediately obvious. Note the difference in the bottom end of the raw curves is different sub integration. The light green lines are the right speaker raw without any equalisation, and the darker green line (mostly hiding behind yellow) is Dirac’s projection after its adjustments. The Harman Curve is more explicitly 6db boosted at the bottom end but then flat. The Dirac Standard is a straight line (on log scale 20Hz to 20kHz) from +2db to -2db. The target curves are the yellow dotted lines on the graphs. The first two graphs show these in Dirac. I had tested quite a few target curves but here I will focus on 2 for illustration – the Dirac Standard and the Harman 6db curves. So I set about listening to different curves and, as a broad generalisation, liked how it tightened the bottom end but not how it added a hint of brightness to the top end – almost independent of curve. Going in I found theory on different target curves and thoughts on personal preferences, but not a lot of discussion I found practical.
![dirac live target dirac live target](https://youthmanreviews.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/rew-vs-dirac-amplitude.png)
I had done some work with REW and corrections exported to Roon previously, but nothing as integrated as the Dirac Live concept of target curves. A couple of months ago I started exploring room equalisation using Dirac Live.