Will these make your SPEAKERS sound BETTER? || Sonarworks SoundID vs Dirac Live

BUY GEAR WITH MY AFFILIATE LINK:

INDEX:
00:00 - Intro
00:45 - What is Room EQ?
01:19 - Sonarworks SoundID
04:31 - Dirac Live
06:22 - Ringing?
07:08 - How flat is flat?
08:00 - I would choose...
10:06 - Disclosure
10:47 - Support me!

[BustaMovePurkinz]

I’ve been using sonarworks and sound ID for a while and it allowed me to hear exactly what I was doing in the mix and made my music translate to other sources in a way that sounded almost perfectly outside of the studio environment. Trust me sonarworks really works.

[katrinaallikas]

Hi Wytse, thank you from Sonarworks for the video - we did know you are working on this :) just to clarify, Sonarworks is still the company name but with the latest software version that was released in March 2021 we did go through the re-branding and now the product name is SoundID Reference.

[exinated]

Thanks for doing this video! I actually come from both a Sonarworks user and a Dirac Live user. I have licenses for both softwares and have used both extensively. My honest opinion and my personal one is I prefer Dirac Live way over Sonarworks. I do not have the luxury of a big room thus the room modes are a little wonky for my space. I noticed it immediately when I moved into my current space and even upgrading my speakers to Amphion One15s + a FlexBase25 stereo subwoofer, my room wasn't doing the speakers justice. So I had to resort to DRC to help me continue doing work.

During my times using Sonarworks, I found the stereo imaging a little scattered. I can't explain it but it always felt that elements in a song mix tend to lose it's position, even when I'm mixing songs it felt it took me a long time to find a good spot for elements in my mix. I stumbled upon Dirac Live a little while back and it totally blew me away. I felt my Amphions were really what they should sound after going through correction, that was the reason why I switched over to Amphions after test driving it in a store. The imaging was extremely precise, centre image was spot on and even moving the pan knob by 1-2 notches in Protools was really obvious. The biggest thing i noticed was my transient response, it felt super tight and precise after the Dirac correction. What i understand is that Dirac also corrects for speaker timings so it hits your ears at the same time.

You can actually customise a filter in the Dirac Room Correction app to your taste and I don't think it's supposed to be completely "flat" per se. I actually did my own filters to tweak the sound of the DRC to my ears and I'm really enjoying it. I hope this gives your viewers and also yourself a perspective of someone who has used both softwares as well. =)

[MichaelSchuerig]

9:32 "Imagine that you have an 18 decibel gap coming from a standing wave at your listening position". In that case all you can do is move your listening position. The peaks and nulls of standing waves (aka room modes) depend on the geometry of your room. You can attenuate them by judiciously positioning the speakers and through acoustic treatment, but you can't move them. Also, you can't fill a gap, i.e. a null point of a room mode. If you boost the affected frequency, you increase the peaks surrounding the null, but at the position of the null, the sound waves (of the particular frequency) still cancel out.

[WilliamAshleyOnline]

5:35 + 6:50 ?? which side were you standing on the left or right, wouldn't it make more sense to be sitting where you normally sit?

[esongsore]

ARC System 3 by IK multimedia did it for me. Most people sleep on IK stuff, but they are golden.

[dicmccoy]

I noticed you were using the Umik-1 in the 0° orientation. Dirac is designed to deal with the reflections and interactions with the room so they recommend you use it in the 90° orientation with the 90° calibration file loaded into Dirac for your Umik-1 of course. You may find you will get better end results with your sound that way. Cheers.

[Speechrezz]

I've been using Sonarworks for a few years now, and at first I couldn't hear any difference. But even after a couple of weeks of using it, it became very apparent how much easier it was for me to hear what was going on in my mixes. Particularly, the low-mids sounded much more precise, and I could much more accurately process my tracks and not get distracted by any resonances my room created.
So overall, Sonarworks is super useful (at least in my bedroom setup)

[chrisllopis]

I’m in a treated room with experience monitors. I have been using sonarworks for many years I must say that Dirac sounds so much better. I use it together with a minidsp box going direct into my speakers. There are some latency but it let me listen to all my hardware through it. It’s great.

[RichCurtisDJ]

As a user of Sonarworks since 2019 I can honestly say it changed my whole home-studio experience and lifted my confidence immeasurably. It isn’t cheap, but it’s one of the best purchases I’ve made

[Packogualandrisofficial]

I tried to optimize my studio as far as possible and then added SoundID/Sonarworks to get those few extra % and I am really impressed how much better my own or my clients' music sounds now on all devices, I can only recommend it :-)

[andreashe]

Got no big Studio etc, but a pair of Speakers and different headphones. Sonarworks helped me a lot getting the right balance of frequencies. Before my music often sounded just bad on different devices like in the car. So maybe a person like me, without a big studio, is the right target. I am happy with it.

[mixphantom]

Neumann's DSP 750 subwoofer is the best I've tried! I own Sonarworks, IK Arc III and have torture tested Dirac and they all have strengths and weaknesses - my tipping point was when I used REW to create my own room correction and it was the one I ended up using! The Neumann DSP software was co-developed with Fraunhofer IIS (yes... the mp3 people) and doesn't try to just make your speakers flat but instead aims to make your monitors sound "as best as possible in your room"... so no gaining of 18dB going on here. As the DSP is in the subwoofer you set the monitors flat and the subwoofer controls the EQ, phase and time alignment. The good news is you don't specifically need Neumann monitors as the subwoofer is essentially in control of everything. Finally, the DSP is stored in the subwoofer DSP so no latency or need of a monitoring plugin - I had to disable Sonarworks when recording as the latency was huge.

[jos]

I want to use my Sonarworks microphone with Dirac Live. I know it needs phantom power to function and I have a Behringer U-PHORIA UMC22 for that purpose and connected that device o my computer with the the cable USB cable, but don't know how to proceed to make the microphone visible in Dirac Live. I can see AUDIO CODEX 1 and 2 in Audio/MIDI, so this device is working as it should, but perhaps the microphone, or Behringer, is not suitable for Dirac Live....who knows and can help me?

[derekcram]

I recently made the switch from Sonarworks to Dirac. I had countless issues with sonarworks, issues locating the mic during measurement, extreme latency (500ms in some cases), and CPU hungry processing. Sonarworks linear phase EQ option I also found was absolutely unbearable with audible pre ringing artifacts on transient sounds like kick drums. With Dirac, I felt the tonal balance is spot on, but I also experienced a dramatic change in stereo imaging quality with the time alignment featured in Dirac on my Dynaudio Core 59 monitors. It was honestly a night and day difference from the first second I ran audio through it. The front to back depth and stereo imaging precision is vastly improved. Sonarworks did a fine job with the tonal balance IMO, but Dirac took the sound quality to new heights in a phase linear way with at least no "audible" ringing artifacts to my ear.

[nantan]

I think sonarworks says you can use a mic stand when making measurements. This helped me get more accurate results.

[rickbarnett]

i have no doubt that you are a very good audio engineer, but if you ever get bored i bet you could be a great stand up comedian !!

[theRumbleChannel]

Interesting review! I did the same comparison about a year ago, and I found Dirac to sound better :). The installation hassle isn't really an argument for me, because it's set and forget. An hour or two more of my time for better sound are well worth it. As for the ringing, Dirac tries to correct the phase response as well, which as far as I know Sonar doesn't. Depending on what kind of speakers one has, this might make quite a difference and of course also cause ringing (have to test this now!). It's actually supposed to improve the impulse response. Measuring with REW I noticed that indeed the phase response was more linear, the impulse response however remained largely the same. Still can't get the Trinnov out of my head 😬...

[noisevector]

Does dirac also offer correction for headphones? That is a big pre for SoundID (or Reference 4 which is the previous version which I still use)

[PDJMDS]

I had to move studio a few years back, the shape of the new room was as such that despite f*** loads of bass traps the bass response was errrr not great. I wasn't a believer in these things but out of pure desperation I tried sonarworks.... I'm now a believer. Saved my life