ART (Active Room Treatment) is a groundbreaking technology for those seeking ultimate control over their sound experience. It represents the next generation of room correction, moving beyond simple equalisation to actively manage the listening environment’s acoustics.
What is ART?
ART is an advanced addition to the Dirac Live suite that utilises your entire speaker system, working in unison, to actively reduce room resonances and dramatically improve bass clarity and definition. Unlike traditional methods that primarily focus on frequency response correction at specific points, ART actively controls the sound field throughout the listening area, especially in the challenging low-frequency range. It offers a level of performance previously only achievable through extensive, and often impractical, physical room treatments or predefined speaker placement standards.
The technology explained
MIMO and speaker collaboration
At the heart of ART lies patented Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) technology. This coordinates all speakers (minimum two) and the room itself as a single, unified acoustic system. ART enables speakers to collaborate acoustically, using the strengths of one speaker to compensate for the weaknesses of another, or to counteract problematic room interactions.
Sound field control
Instead of just correcting the response at the microphone positions, ART actively controls the sound field across the entire listening area. It uses “support loudspeakers” (subwoofers or any speaker capable below 150 Hz) to supplement the output of “main loudspeakers” and actively counteract undesired room effects like resonances and reflections caused by them.
Frequency focus
ART specifically targets frequencies below 150 Hz. This is where room modes – commonly referred to as standing waves – are most prominent and detrimental to bass quality, causing unevenness and prolonged decay times. Above 150 Hz, standard Dirac Live Room Correction (per-speaker impulse response correction) takes over.
Phase alignment & impulse response
Sophisticated algorithms optimise the phase relationship between all speakers. This collaboration actively minimises room-induced resonances and optimises the impulse response across the listening area, leading to clearer, more impactful sound. ART aims to significantly reduce late reflections and reverberation in the bass region.
What makes ART special?
Reduced room resonance & reverberation
Measurably shortens bass decay times, eliminating muddy, lingering bass and revealing detail.
Tighter, cleaner bass
Delivers impactful, precise low-frequency reproduction.
Expanded consistent listening area
Actively minimises spatial variation across measurement points, ensuring the target sound curve is better achieved across multiple listening positions. This leads to significantly enhanced seat-to-seat consistency compared to traditional room correction.
Optimised speaker usage
Every speaker in the system (within the 20-150 Hz range) actively contributes, either playing its own content or supporting others to create the ideal sound field. Performance scales and improves as more capable speakers are added to the collaborative network.
Flexible placement
Works effectively with various speaker layouts, including asymmetrical configurations, without strict placement demands often required by passive treatments or specific array techniques.
ART system requirements
– An ART-certified AVR.
(Or device with an ART-certified DSP.)
– A Dirac Live license with the ART add-on.
– Crucially: If using subwoofers, a Dirac Live Bass Control (DLBC) license is also required. ART technically incorporates advanced bass management, but the DLBC license is needed for systems explicitly configured with subwoofers.
– The Dirac Live desktop application (Windows/Mac) for calibration.
– An omnidirectional measurement microphone.
ART vs other technologies
ART vs. Room Correction (RC)
RC corrects frequency and impulse response for each speaker individually, averaging performance across the measured area. ART goes further by using MIMO to actively control the sound field using all speakers, resulting in significantly better spatial consistency and target curve adherence across seats. RC does not perform dedicated bass management or active sound field control like BC or ART.
ART vs. Bass Control (BC)
BC focuses on automating subwoofer setup, blending subs with mains, and ensuring consistent bass response across the listening area. ART simply takes the next step and goes beyond, actively creating an ideal sound field by coordinating all available speakers to control resonances and decay times. ART offers more advanced control over spatial variation than BC.
ART vs. passive treatment
ART actively uses speakers to control low-frequency resonances, 150 Hz and below; something that might be impractical or extremely costly to achieve with passive acoustic treatment alone. Although a combination of both might achieve the best results in some use cases.
ART vs. other digital methods:
While other sophisticated digital methods exist, ART differentiates itself with its specific MIMO approach using not only subwoofers, but all available speakers (with capacity below 150 Hz) collaboratively. It offers flexibility with asymmetrical/varied speaker layouts compared to methods requiring specific symmetrical arrays or predefined speaker placements/standards.
For more information on ART and MIMO room correction, read our white paper.
For more information on use cases and setup guidelines, read this paper.