Continually pushing the boundaries of digital room treatment, Dirac has announced Dirac Live Active Room Treatment, the latest in its family of award-winning Dirac Live features designed to address bass resonance and room decay time to produce a cleaner, tighter bass experience than ever before.
Dirac Live Active Room Treatment will debut in all StormAudio AVRs through a Spring 2023 firmware update.
“Dirac pioneered digital room correction through our impulse response optimisation technology found in our acclaimed Dirac Live Room Correction feature,” said Mathias Johansson, Dirac’s chief product officer. “Now, with Active Room Treatment we are moving beyond traditional room correction to actually reduce bass decay times digitally, without needing bass traps or thick layers of wall absorption.”
The new technology utilises Dirac’s expertise in MIMO mixed-phase impulse response correction technology to enable spatial optimisation, whereby all speakers in a sound system cooperate with each other to accomplish what passive acoustic treatments struggle to achieve. With decay times reduced digitally and automatically, listeners experience clear sound devoid of boomy bass, as if the room itself didn’t exist.
Managing bass response and room reflections have always required physical sound dampeners to be installed on the walls or other areas. In contrast, Dirac Live Active Room Treatment works much like the popular Active Noise Cancellation technology, using the system’s own speakers to actively cancel out unwanted wavelengths originating from other speakers. This is achieved by measuring the entire set up as a unified system, instead of targeting each speaker individually, and applying advanced spatial optimisation to the entire system based on the needs of each unique room.


In many listening spaces, such as home entertainment rooms, it can take a long time for bass to decay or stop bouncing around the room, resulting in ringing or booming. Dirac Live Active Room Treatment automatically evaluates and adjusts the bass characteristics of the entire system, leveraging the strengths of each speaker to make up for any shortcomings in other systems. This effectively turns passive speakers into active support units, strengthening the entire system.
“By actively optimising and coordinating bass response characteristics from all the speakers in a system, our latest Dirac Live feature reduces decay times to provide an incredibly dense and transparent audio experience in any room,” Johansson continued.
Complementing Dirac Live Room Correction and Dirac Live Bass Control, Dirac Live Active Treatment works together with the Dirac Live features to dramatically improve sound performance in any listening area. It can be used in any system with more than one speaker, with progressive performance enhancements based on the total speakers in the system. The more speakers a system has, the greater the effect of the spatial optimisation.

“Passive treatments for controlling low-end resonances have been around for years, but they’re not necessarily effective and require physical changes to the listening area, so most people don’t use them,” added Johansson. “Dirac Live Active Room Treatment is the only solution available that reduces room decay time for a much clearer and tighter bass. StormAudio recognises the transformative power of this world’s first technology and we look forward to its debut in Spring 2023.”
All StormAudio Processors and AVRs ordered from 1 January 2023 will have Dirac Live Active Room Treatment included free of charge following a firmware update made available in the spring. StormAudio products ordered before 1 January 2023 will be upgradeable with Dirac Live Active Room Treatment after the spring 2023 firmware update and by purchasing a licence from Dirac’s online store.
Dirac will be demonstrating the Dirac Live Active Room Treatment feature at CES 2023 in its private suite at the Venetian Hotel.