Bertel

Hi!

I have had the pleasure to receive my "black beauty" (530xd touring) last Friday - what a great ride... ;-) Since am an audio freak, I had it equipped with BMW's latest and greatest, the "Individual High End Audio System" (aka DIRAC) of BMW's Individual company. So I turned on the radio with the highest expectations, and it sounded - like crap...

Ok, I have learnt from various posts and topics over the weekend here in the forum that this has happened to many poor guys with their Logic 7 systems who had not been deep into tweaking their treble, bass and equalizer settings to get the best out of it but wo simply used the factory defaults of all "0" - these are just not acceptable at all...

Having gotten over that, this is what I will do: I've got an audio test CD with White and Pink Noise, an artificial head microfone (resembling the driver when seated in the car at the most natural and likely way) and a laptop with a Real-Time Analyzer piece of software. I'll set the fader to my taste (soundstage bit more to the back, -3 so to speak - I don't like the artists to play on top of my dashboard but more to the left and right of me...), set the "Raumklang" setting to "Surround" (there's no other option apart from the default "Stereo", but that's fine), play the pink noise (also the white noise to see if there's any difference), record through the artificial head mike exactly how the car interior, myself as absorber and everything else perform, and feed the result into the RTA software, look at the graph, firstly adjust treble and bass, then fine tune with the 7 band equalizer that comes with the audio system - and post the findings here in order to see if anyone else might find that useful and/or interesting... ;-)

Might take a few days, I'll be back once I have my first results. If anyone has comments, recommndations, feedback or devastating critical notes, please don't hesitate to share! ;-)

Best,
Bertel

Russ1974

Bass Full. Treble Full. Middle, half way.

That's how I like my EQ on every stereo (car or otherwise) I've ever had. I have a DIRAC on order, due in a couple of weeks, and hopefully it'll sound great with my "usual" config!!

uglybear

Sorry to disappoint you, but only poorly designed, constructed and installed audio systems need this kind of EQ. I used to do it when I was young and could not afford a decent stereo setup. Stopped doing it years go. Besides, high end audio gears does not even have tone controls, leave alone EQ - it simply does not need them.

Bertel

Hi Bear!

Yes, that's the kind of background and experience I come from too, and it served me well in cars before like the Phaeton where only a few minor adjustments to the factory default according to personal preferences could be imagined to make it sound even better...

On the other hand, a highly complex car audio setup like the Individual DIRAC system is basically more or less at the "opposite end" of the kind of high end audio equipment that you mention, where the integrity and purity of the original, untouched audio signal have to be maintained at all cost (mostly quite literally... ), thus class A amplifiers, highly selected components, no EQ, no tone controls etc. A system like the DIRAC is by design completely different: "DIRAC Live, a BMW proprietary exclusive technology of signal processing", "corrects the speaker's impulse response and thus leads to a linear and correctly timed audio reproduction inside the car", "reverberations and resonances are calculated in advance and are compensated with exactly calculated correction function", "DIRAC Live allows to modfy the audio signal in timing and frequency so that the various timing delays and sonic reflexions ar compensated" and so on...

Since the interior of a car just naturally is a very "bad" or at least complicated place for audio reproduction (narrow space, high damping through floor and seat materials, interference through people sitting in the car, engine and traffic sounds etc.), you're much better suited with a system that lets you allow to compensate for that, which is what those high-end car audio systems aim at and usually do an excellent job at.

The issue here for me is rather: It's excellent to have a system that gives you so many possibilities to enhance and correct the audio signal reproduction - but (as in most options like the adaptive cruise control, the setup of the adaptive automatic gear transmission etc.) I would have expected more like a "recommended" good default setting that you then may fine tune to adjust to your personal taste, not the "here you are all the tools, go figure how to get the best results" aproach that it looks like to me - and that btw was/is also the case with the Logic 7 system where you here on this forum and elsewhere can browse through thread-long discussions to get "recommended" settings for tone controls, L7 and EQ to achieve decent audio reproduction...

But anyway, I'll do a few RTA measurements in the next days and see what I'll get - in "default" as well as with all the controls and EQ settings geared up...

Cheers,
Bertel

Russ1974

Bah. Just pump up the bass.

Flavio

Did you manage to do the measurements yet? I have the Direac system in my M5 as well andI would like to know what the frequency response is.

narvselius

Same here!

Actually, when I got my car I set the EQ so that it looked like an "U".... but after some hours of painful listening I flatten it so that there is now only a minor increase of bass and treble - it's a fantastic system that is really detailed, crisp and accurate. It doesn't need an EQ.

subterFUSE

Can you elaborate on what "crap" means? Is it distorted? Is it bass-heavy? Are the highs too bright? Are you getting crackles, pops, etc...
Do you not like the stereo imaging?

I am not familiar with the settings on the DIRAC system. But I do have Logic 7. On the Logic 7 we have separate settings for "Bass-Mid-Treb" and also a Equalizer. Is the same true with your DIRAC?

If so, I would suggest you stay away from making adjustments with the Bass/Treb controls. An EQ is a more high-end solution, because it gives more precise control.

Using an RTA is one way to adjust EQ settings. However, it is not necessarily the best way. I am an old car stereo competitor, and can tell you from experience that having an EQ response curve that scores well on the RTA meter test doesn't always mean it sounds pleasing to listen to. EQ settings will vary depending on your music source. Every recording made will require different EQ settings depending on how it was mastered. Record labels frequently employ audio engineers to tweak their recordings before releasing to the public. This is why some music CDs sound louder than others when played on the same stereo at the same volume level. One CD might have been compressed/limited all to hell, and sounds loud... but the waves are all clipped and the dynamics are shot to shit. So there will never be a single solution to all music. I am not discouraging you from using the RTA. It's awesome you've got that ability, and it's worth a try. But ultimately it will depend on what music you are listening to.

As for your soundstage.... from what you are describing, you seem to dislike playing a recording as the artist intended it to be heard. The artist is supposed to sound like they are standing on your hood. Great care is taken when recording to get that perceptual effect. And high-end stereo systems are designed to reproduce that effect. That's the whole point of time-alignment, DSP and etc... In the car, the listener can't sit in the middle, so you have 2 options for creating better sound. Either you move the speakers to locations where the path length is more equal, or you employ time alignment to correct the perceived distances from each speaker to your ear. From the description of the DIRAC system, they are using time alignment.

On the Logic 7, we have two surround modes. Theater and Concert. Both surround settings attempt to steer vocals to the front, center-channel speaker. The Theater mode applies more bias towards the center channel, while Concert attempts to balance the sound more between all front speakers. Concert setting still achieves a more proper, frontal soundstage... but the effect is a wider sounding stage. Theater sounds very focused on the center channel. I prefer the Concert setting, personally. I cannot listen to the stereo with the Logic 7 turned off, because it makes the music sound like it is coming from behind me, and I hate that.