MultEQ 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 and 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.
At the core of everything Audyssey creates is our first technology, MultEQ. Based on 6 years and $6 million of research at the USC Immersive Audio Lab, this is the key enabling technology for the sound experience delivered by all products with the Audyssey name on them.
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. At the heart of MultEQ is a patented method for measuring an audio system in multiple positions throughout a home theater, a movie theater, a recording studio, or a car. Capturing information in the time domain and combining that information in a patented new way enables MultEQ to evaluate not only the frequency response, but reflections in the audio path that effect time of arrival and cause distortion. With this information, MultEQ can equalize an audio system resulting in improved soundstage, accurate tonal balance, deeper and more defined bass, and overall improved imaging. Audyssey EQ is a direct extension of MultEQ for products that come with attached loudspeakers such as televisions and home theater in a box systems. MultEQ is used to precisely measure the system's performance at our labs and in typical rooms to create a preset sound optimization solution for Audyssey EQ. Audio systems can now reach their true potential because the problems caused by acoustical distortion from the room, speaker placement, and the enclosure are removed.
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?
MultEQ calibrates your room in 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?
MultEQ is different from the many systems in the past because of two differentiators:- The way it measures your room
- By correcting both time and frequency problems
- 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.Time and Frequency correction:
- 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.
