Audyssey corrects sound distortion caused by room acoustics, in every seat, automatically. Your audio system was not designed for your room. It does not know your room's size, where the walls and furniture are located nor which materials are absorbing and reflecting sound. Audyssey MultEQ measures and removes the distortion caused by room acoustics, delivering the best possible sound for everyone in your listening room.
Every seat is now the best seat in the house
Until now, world class sound was limited to the best theaters. Now, with Audyssey MultEQ you can hear accurate, enveloping, and distortion-free sound everywhere in your listening room. MultEQ was developed over five years with $6 million of University-based research to discover how to build an advanced automatic system that can measure the acoustics of the room and correct audible sound distortion throughout the entire listening area, not just in one spot.
Sound Unmasked
When you experience Audyssey technology, a cloudy layer is lifted away, leaving only clear, accurate, natural sound. Voice and dialog become focused and intelligible, musical balance is restored, musical instruments and sound effects become precisely localized, and surround soundstage is made seamless and enveloping. Read the reviews.
Personal or professional installation
Audyssey MultEQ ships as a standard feature in products from many of today's leading home-theater system manufacturers and can be self-installed. For even higher performance, a professional installation can be performed by an Audyssey-Certified Installer. Read Audyssey Installer Stories to learn more.
ABOUT MULTEQ
How does MultEQ work?
Three easy steps:
- Hook up the microphone, place it in the middle of the listening area, push a button, wait quietly while MultEQ pings each speaker with a special signal.
- Move the microphone to up to 8 (32 in the Pro version) positions and wait for the speakers to be pinged again.
- MultEQ calculates a room correction solution for each channel.
Done. Total time elapsed about 8 minutes.
Then the fun starts. Turn it on and be amazed how your system sounds.
What makes MultEQ work when so many others have tried to solve this problem for decades?
Two things:
- The way it measures your room
- By correcting both time and frequency problems
There are two types of systems out there today:
- Those that attempt to correct for only one seat in the room. This typically makes other seats in the room sound worse because a single measurement does not provide an accurate representation of the problems of the entire room.
- Some EQ systems do try to correct for multiple positions. They simply average the measurement results that they gather. Averaging tends to smooth out common acoustical problems, and therefore doesn't fix them. For example, if there is a peak at 200 Hz in one seat and a dip at 200 Hz in another seat (typical room), then the two measurements average each other out and there is no correction attempted.
In either case, these systems only attempt to correct frequency response problems and not time domain problems and this leaves a big part of the problem unsolved.
How does MultEQ measure your room differently?
MultEQ looks at patterns in the time domain responses and classifies them into clusters based on the similarities in those patterns, typically in 3-5 groups. A representative response is created from each cluster, and a final response is then created from grouping the representatives. That response is then used to create the EQ filter. It is a complicated process that is based on the complex mathematics of pattern recognition and fuzzy logic. But there is nothing fuzzy about the results. If you want to know more, we offer copies of selected publications we have written for technical conferences.
- The time domain is where many of the problems reside. Parametric and graphic equalizers can only correct for the frequency response and do so in a very coarse manner because they have limited resolution (bands).
- Further, whether they have fixed or adjustable bands it does not matter because bands cause phase problems that most people hear as "ringing" or "smearing." This is why, after thirty plus years of trying this method most people don't like the results and turn it off.
How does MultEQ address time and frequency problems?
MultEQ filters start in the time domain. They are not just a few parametric bands. Instead they use several hundred points to represent the room response in both the frequency and time domains.
The trick is to use enough filter points to get the needed resolution, but not
so many that it overwhelms the processor inside the audio component.
So, we came up with a way to reduce the number of points without
sacrificing accuracy and a way to provide more filter power at lower frequencies where it is needed the most. MultEQ can correct 8 channels by using only a fraction of a single DSP chip. This gives you the best of both worlds: time and frequency correction. Result--room correction that works
for the first time ever.
What about calibrating my system?
In addition to all of our very complex EQ work, we also do the simple things
really well. During step 1 above, MultEQ checks the absolute polarity of
your system and tells you if any speakers are out of polarity (the + - wiring
problem), measures the acoustical distance (within a 1/4 inch) to each
speaker and sets the proper level trims for all channels including the
subwoofer. Finally, it finds the optimum crossover frequency between each
satellite channel and the subwoofer(s) and provides that information to the
bass management system.
