Audio DiffMaker

[Ducatista47]

I also believe that listening to things with a microphone is instructive. Most measurement systems used at a hobby level employ a $50. omnidirectional mic. They nearly don't even care which way they are pointed.

Try listening to your system through a quality cardioid measurement mic and headphones in real time while moving and pointing the mic around the room. This will give you some idea of just how much filtering the gray matter computer between your ears is doing, and help you focus on what and where improvements can be made. This is much like soloing a channel on a mixing desk.

Barry.

Or even look at the plots of two measurements taken a few cm apart. Run them through the Diffmaker and you'll see/hear a huge difference and it is the same system in the same room.???

Widget

Total agreement. Small differences in listening location, like getting up to change something and sitting down again, have long been known to alter what is heard. A late friend who ran an audio dealership for years would say things like, "I have never heard an interconnect or speaker wire that didn't change the sound. It is not always a good change, but there always has been one."

I knew better than to propose that a movement of a centimeter would change a lot. He didn't want to hear that reasoning. He made a lot of money selling wire.

That's another reason DiffMaker seems like a useful tool to me. The microphone setup, unlike our ears, doesn't move between recordings.