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Minidsp CDSP-DL 8x12 Dirac live upgrade or new release help

144K views 1K replies 66 participants last post by  zacjones99 
#1 ·
My cdspdl will be here tomorrow or next day ,

If anyone also has upgraded there’s or got a new unit and experienced any issues with yours please share what those issues are and how you resolved them.

I will try and help anyone with there unit as much as I can if you having issues.
Me and a few others have been using ddrc24s ddrc22s or ddrc88s or 2x4HDs which all share a similar platform as far as the UI and functionality.
I’m sure there’s some experts here that can share somethings also.

On the minidsp forum a couple ppl had issues getting Dirac to output and a new firmware was given, I do not know if it is live and a official build or if it was a patch that minidsp supplied to them on a individual basis.

This is a very good unit and packed with power. even the most problematic acoustic problems can be made into sweet music bliss with this guy.
There is a learning curve to this type of dsp but it’s easy and anyone can do it.
You will make even the most experienced tuners shake and tremble when you have one of these installed.

Hope to get good input from anyone that has got there’s already.
Please let us know what isn’t working or doesn’t make sense the way you initially thought we can get it working the right way with a little bit.

There’s a gain structure procedure on minidsp for the ddrc88a/bm and it’s very good. This should be adopted to the CDSP-DL as it’s almost the same unit, and the level setting part is the same.

Thanks in advance:surprised:
 
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#48 ·
I woke up and was sorta scared to listen again
Was worried it wouldn’t sound the same ....

It’s still spaceship sounding. I don’t know how to describe it but it
Kinda sounds like your in a car and kinda not. And the depth of sound in the foreground behind the physical speaker locations is hard to believe. It’s like I’m in a living room with a nice set of towers or bookshelves sitting dead between them, except I’m offset and has car imaging

The recording plays a lot I think , but every recording I’ve played sounds better. Some have so much ambiance two that stood out were (Mary Chaplin Carpenter;come on come on
And “save me (feat .Adra) adventure club “ <spaceship song and Woner (feat. The kite string temple ) adventure club

That’s all I’ve played so far I’m going to play some other tracks today some Jennifer warren and stuff to try out and see how sounds
 
#50 ·
I woke up and was sorta scared to listen again

Was worried it wouldn’t sound the same ....



It’s still spaceship sounding. I don’t know how to describe it but it

Kinda sounds like your in a car and kinda not. And the depth of sound in the foreground behind the physical speaker locations is hard to believe. It’s like I’m in a living room with a nice set of towers or bookshelves sitting dead between them, except I’m offset and has car imaging



The recording plays a lot I think , but every recording I’ve played sounds better. Some have so much ambiance two that stood out were (Mary Chaplin Carpenter;come on come on

And “save me (feat .Adra) adventure club “ <spaceship song and Woner (feat. The kite string temple ) adventure club



That’s all I’ve played so far I’m going to play some other tracks today some Jennifer warren and stuff to try out and see how sounds
Julia sheer. Jon d. "Little talks" on Spotify.

There is a female and male vocal and on my car. Male is left center. Female is right center. It sounds really really good.

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#49 ·
So, you would say you are pleased with the C-DSP then :-D

I'm planning to see if I can figure out the signal too low message in a couple hours, have some ideas of what to try and if that message still pops up will email support with a video / screenshots etc.
 
#54 · (Edited)
I’m getting 11.67dbu (about 2.9vrms) with sliders all set to 0 and no peq or crossovers turned on at 1khz MOL

That’s a very usable signal.... 3x as much as a was seeing with the 2x4hds I was getting.779vrms

My alpine x series amps unity gain (nom) in middle is 2.83vrms , I’m so close to that I’m just going with the unity setting on the alpine amps

The Rockford amps don’t have a unity marker and I don’t know the input topology (rebuffed or voltage divider) so I’m just going to match it with my meter to the alpine amps and get the outputs matched. There older amps so that’s about 1/3 way up.

I’ll eat the driver sensitivity difference in my output slider ( I’m only turning down the horns -3db) the rest will be cut in eq. I’m getting no noise and no hiss so if I’m a tiny bit hot on horns that’s ok I want the room to eq anyway.


That’s also with my iPhone as a source with toslink out of nx807 , my iPhone I want to say is upwards of 10db under 0dbfs as when I’m using Bt AptX I get way more gain, but this is how I’m going to listen so this is how gains get set.

Had to call it quits the wife needed to go somewhere so I’m the babysitter now

When she gets back I’m measuring.
 
#56 ·
So, I tried to see if I could not get the low signal message, nope. Picked my quietest speaker, which for me is the drivers side left rear. Turned up the input gain until that was just about hitting -6 on the scale, then did the same with all the other speakers. Same signal too low error. Annoying.

I also get a weird thing happen anytime I try to use 7 Dirac channels, could be user error though. But, essentially I lose pretty much all of my output except on the tweeters and rear fill, even though on my target curve I pull down the target for the tweeters to match that of the mid / mid-bass. Will probably try another set of measurements tomorrow to see if I can figure it out.

Actually, that is my one complaint so far with the Dirac unit. With my manual tune I had really nice mid-bass / sub-bass, that seems to be lacking currently. Could be as simple as the target I am using, the tune I have now sounds great, but is just lacking that thump.
 
#57 ·
Actually, that is my one complaint so far with the Dirac unit. With my manual tune I had really nice mid-bass / sub-bass, that seems to be lacking currently. Could be as simple as the target I am using, the tune I have now sounds great, but is just lacking that thump.
Interesting. When looking at the specifications for the MiniDSP 8x12 DL, it shows an X next to bass management. Can anyone explain what that means? Dirac allows you to set a curve so shouldn’t it be able to manage the sub-bass as well? Or are they saying that with Dirac, PEQ manipulation is not available? Then again, the regular 8x12 is also not shown as having bass management and I would consider an 8x12 to have bass management capabilities.
 
#58 ·
With the 8x12 DL it has a bass management tab that you can pull a subwoofer feed out of your inputs, you can set the crossovers, levels etc. on that tab for the sub. I think!! Then you have the PEQ, crossovers, time delay, levels etc. for the sub on the output tabs.

It does have PEQ, so after you run Dirac you can then manipulate the response some using that. In all honesty, I suspect my issue with the lacking bass is the curve I am using, I'd bet if I use a different curve that I can get the bass back to where I like it. Not saying that it is bad currently, it's not, its just not as hard hitting as I am used to based on previous manual tunes.
 
#59 ·
With the 8x12 DL it has a bass management tab that you can pull a subwoofer feed out of your inputs, you can set the crossovers, levels etc. on that tab for the sub. I think!! Then you have the PEQ, crossovers, time delay, levels etc. for the sub on the output tabs.



It does have PEQ, so after you run Dirac you can then manipulate the response some using that. In all honesty, I suspect my issue with the lacking bass is the curve I am using, I'd bet if I use a different curve that I can get the bass back to where I like it. Not saying that it is bad currently, it's not, its just not as hard hitting as I am used to based on previous manual tunes.


Probably because the manual tunes had too much bass. [emoji12]


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#62 ·
John, when are you going to buy one of these?... I know your entertaining the idea ;)
 
#68 ·
I've heard MiniDSP ships freakishly fast internationally (3-5 days).
 
#69 ·
So gang ,

Got my levels set and ran it again

Definitely a glitch with the low levels thing , naiku, you were right buddy the whole time
It seems to not keep a constant connection to dsp in DLCT , when you press start there’s a audible click like it’s connecting to dsp. I think there’s a latency issue and it’s not seeing the channel in time. But I want to say I saw it do it once before I even pressed start , but I get the message late so it could’ve been in next measurement by than.

This bug needs to be addressed and i will inform the DevTeam about this issue as well.

The tune tho. Again. Wow. I started off with no delays no peq (except on horns they have a +15db spot at 4K so it had to go down to be able to complete the measurements)

After the tune the left was a bit too loud , but I couldn’t get my left mic positions because of clipping the horns, I need to add more pre eq. So I’m the end I turned down the left horn 1.8db and i had to flip the polarity on the 2118h and add .5ms to the left. But it sounds killer. Much better than what I’m used to. The bass is dialed , lots of ambience, super clear vocals.

The bass management works great you send a HPf to everything and a LPf to sub pre Dirac ( I think so it can allocate fir taps better)

The mic gain on the ddrcs never go above 0 this one seems a maybe (gets sensitive fast)


I would suggest getting gains dialed because in DLCT the gain sliders actually lock the levels of those speakers as part of the configuration. That’s a waste of input voltage/signal. Throwing away signal to noise. So if gains aren’t good close DLCT and fix the issue keep the outputs pegged on each channel.

Minidsp I am confident will fix these bugs rather quickly, this is definitely the best dsp to ever be released for car audio, no question about that at all.

Plenty of output voltage , up to 4vrms , at unity it’s 2.9 (I would guess there intention was 2.83vrms) at least when I measured with my gear. And I tend to not do something right when it comes to optical in and analog out and measuring output voltage.

It’s very good made some videos , waiting for them to upload
 
#73 ·
The video was sniped on YouTube for copyrights. Maybe try on Vimeo?
 
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#86 ·
Dirac Live sounds like a lot of other well proven room EQ correction software. I use Sonarworks Reference 4 and it takes an average of 32 points measurements around my seat. Works very well for my room.

What most people who use REW here don't even take averages which will hurt them in the end when they start tuning freqs above 1khz. Those change drastically when you move the mic.

Glad to hear this type of system is working well for car audio as well.


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#90 ·
I have one of these in order to play with in the Audi, and possibly going in the Mercedes if I like it.

Question...

Are the measurements taken in REW or is the Dirac a separate software?

Could you take measurements in a different software and import them for Dirac processing?


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#100 ·
Low levels bug fixed
Yep. Downloaded and installed it earlier, no more having to deal with that annoying pop up message every single time. Took a minute of tweaking the output level to stop it from clipping. The forward left measurement puts the mic close to the speakers, so while it was good at the "sweet spot" when close to the speakers it was clipping.

All good now though.
 
#101 ·
Did you get a chance to take the REW measurements? I really want to see if Dirac software is lying or not.


It would be nice to take the same measurements you took with Dirac then average them out within REW to see the freq response curve. Maybe even just take one measurement from the center of the listening position.

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#102 · (Edited)
Are you looking to see what the response curve looks like in REW? I thought I had already posted one a few pages back, not of an ideal measurement (subwoofer was not included in the sweeps, so the sub level is way off), but it shows the response as measured by REW after I ran Dirac and used the auto target. If that's all you are looking for, I will try to take another in a couple hours, will likely just be one measurement from center of the listening position.

If I remember to I will also take a screenshot of the Dirac software to show the curve I am using in there and see if it will overlay on top of the REW screen.

OK, here you go, Dirac screen and then a shot of REW while playing pink noise, 1/12 smoothing:





So, what is odd to me is that the subwoofer response is down about 5dB in comparison to everything else. But, I will also add that I increased the output of the midbass/mids some after applying the Dirac filters, so it could be just that. Should be very simple to resolve though assuming that's all it is. Actually, I think I just realized what that is from, when setting the output levels in DLCT I reduced the sub channel by about 10dB to stop it clipping, also an easy enough fix. Looks like a new set of measurements tomorrow.

The dip at 450Hz is I believe my fault in not lowering the target curve to the bottom of that dip initially. This was a set of measurements I took earlier today after MiniDSP had fixed the low level bug, with it being 83F ambient temperature and feeling like 92F I was spending as little time sitting in the car as possible. Hope that is what you were looking for.
 
#103 ·
If you take 28 measurements of each side and time align them in rew and use the same spots you measurements on Dirac are it will be the same. Done it many times


Sorry tonynca I hadn’t had time. Thanks naiku for posting


Yes the sub is different as the bass knob will make it show different but especially with bass management is exact
 
#104 ·
So I did something really cool with my CDSPDL ....


I added my remote and I linked my midbass to the volume knob, I already have a bass knob for sub amp, it’s very nice to fatten things up on the fly , one could also link the midbass and tweeter to it and it would be an adjustable “loud” controls or more precisely a fletcher Munson device (the smiley face maker )

But it works very nice , in hot temps the midbass is lacking FOH ppl also do that at concerts as the venue heats up and people sweat, the higher temps mess with things


So that is very nice to have on hand , I can raise the sub and midbass , so I could dial a flat target and make my house curve on the fly ...I totally love it
 
#106 ·
That's a pretty good resp curve man. What's the scale here?? Are those lines 5db increments??


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