Accurate Sound Reproduction Using DSP by Mitch Barnett

This book provides the audio enthusiast with an easy-to-follow step-by-step guide for designing a custom digital filter that corrects the frequency and timing response of your loudspeakers in your listening environment so that the music arriving at your ears matches as closely as possible to the content on the recording.

Industry guidelines, spanning over 40 years of evolution, are referenced throughout the book, providing the recommended target responses for accurate sound reproduction. Correcting the measured response to known target responses is, in effect, matching the acoustic output signal arriving at your ears to the digital audio stored in a media file. The target responses can also be tailored to your own preferences.

The chapter on the acoustics and psychoacoustics of room correction explains why we hear what we hear in small-room acoustics and what our ears care about most when it comes to accurate sound reproduction. There are individual chapters on industry target responses for frequency and step response, group delay, energy time curve, reverb time, polar response and interaural coherence coefficient (i.e., imaging).

Advanced sections of the book show you how to design and implement digital crossovers, driver linearization, and driver time alignment; how to compensate for brickwall antialiasing filters; and how to use the Beamforming quasi-anechoic measurement technique. All of these sections are designed to incrementally improve your sound reproduction system's accuracy.

The last section of the book shows you how to perform loopback measurements to verify the design and operation of your digital correction filter, not only at the listening position, but across a wide listening area as well.

Whether your sound reproduction system is a computer desktop speaker system, stereo audiophile system, home theater multi-channel system, mains and sub-woofer system, DIY audio system, or car sound system, the results are audible, measurable, and repeatable.

To benefit the most from this step-by-step guide, you will require a computer, a calibrated measurement microphone, an Analog to Digital (ADC)/Digital to Analog (DAC) converter, and two commercial software packages: Acourate DSP Audio Toolbox and JRiver Media Center.

With over 260 color screen captures of the software in action, plus 200 links to industry reference material and knowledge, this book is the definitive guide to Accurate Sound Reproduction Using Digital Signal Processing (DSP).

home page: