Az,

Close. Very close. But...

That's one heck of a unit. I imagine it could also be programmed to pour draft beer if it had to! But it's way more than what I'm suggesting. AND (correct me if I'm wrong) it's a two channel unit.

I'm thinking more along the lines of two things: the very simplistic "push one button and calibrate your entire 7.1 set-up in 3 minutes or less" which seems to be built into most mid (and up) receivers nowadays; and a straightforward way of inserting it into your system - a la Outlaw ICBM.

In other words it would be the size of the ICBM. It would have have 7.1 (and/or 7.2) analogue inputs - and the corresponding outputs. You would hook it up between your pre-amp and power amps. It would digitize the inputs, process them, and then output them in analogue format.

The processing would take the input of one or more (provided) calibrated mics. In analyze / set-up / calibrate mode it would output signals to the amps, listen to the response from the speakers, and adjust the usual parameters (speaker distance, level, maybe even phase, AND flatten the response - say from 20-20,000HZ.) Users could perhaps specify a non-flat response - say with a sloping-off high end if they found "flat" to be too bright - as most do. Users could save the results.

Then in play mode the results would be applied to whatever input comes its way.

Simple, extremely useful, and surely not very expensive. (Given the complexity and price of $406 for the Behringer unit, I gotta believe that my $300 figure would be the absolute maximum necessary price - with $200-250 being more like it.

And now that I think of it it would also include all of the functionality of the ICBM - ie. adjustible cut-off frequencies for each channel. Heck why not go whole hog. Let the system interrogate your speakers and determine what the ideal cut-off should be for each one! Just set all of your pre-amps parameters to "LARGE" and "SUBWOOFER" and "THE SAME DISTANCE" "Etc." and let the MACK-1 processor do its thing. Now that would make it THE winner in my books.

Outlaw?

Jeff Mackwood

Jeff,

FWIW, the street price is $350. Also, they can be daisy chained. While it's not a one button plug and play RTA, it's not too terrible to use it.

I have one that I use for setting up rooms and it works great. I've even installed it in the HT just to EQ the mains for 2 channel and had no complaints.

TrueRTA has better resolution for identifying low frequency probelms.