alt Hacker NewsIt's equal parts science and art. Best left as a last resort, never a shortcut. These utilities are generally directed towards much louder systems, in bigger spaces, with far more than a few speakers. Everything that has bled down into the consumer space is a band aid for people who either can't or don't know/care/want to treat their rooms and position speakers correctly.
Ideally you want to be going into it intenting to correct a specific aspect of the room or the speakers, after already ensuring that you've placed the speakers correctly for the room and listening position. If you did not use a tape measure and the full dimensions of the speakers, start over. One of the most useful things REW/Dirac can do for you is confirm that you've placed everything correctly. It is not a magic "make it sound better" utility.
Hate to sound like an ad but the most impressive thing I've purchased wrt audio in the past 20 years has been some isolators from https://isoacoustics.com/. It's legit engineering magic, you will spend the first hour thinking something is wrong with your body because you can no longer feel the sound.
> a band aid for people who either can't or don't know/care/want to treat their rooms and position speakers correctly.
Indeed, but I'd bet many people are in the "can't" category. Especially for low frequencies, you need pretty hefty treatment to make a difference, which is oftentimes impractical to install in a room which wasn't designed for that. And I seriously doubt any sizable number of rooms in apartments are designed for that. Combine this with the ungodly amount of snake oil peddled, and I can easily understand why many people look at Dirac and similar solutions.
And while they are band-aids, in many cases that's enough. I used to live in a studio apartment where room correction made a night and day difference to my listening position. Elsewhere the sound wasn't that great, but I didn't really care since I never listened from theme. I was renting, and the space was rather small, so there was no way to install any useful treatment.
In my current apartment it works much worse, it's actually close to useless. But it's rather bigger, so I could put in some treatment. But I've spent a lot of time researching this, and it's still not clear how to go about doing this. People can't even seem to agree on what kind of material to look at. And while I love listening to music, I'm not keen on investing thousands, plus time living under construction for weeks just to throw multiple solutions at the walls and see what sticks.