What led to DRC?

When we first started development of theTact Room Correction System (RCS) system in the early 1990's, we were fully aware that we were embarking on a long term research program, breaking new ground in the formidable area of true, full range room acoustic correction. Only the parallel development of sophisticated, high-speed digital processing has allowed us to attain the dramatic breakthroughs that we have since achieved. As a result ofTact’s ongoing research and development, led by Dr. Radomir Bozovic, we introduced theTact-2.0 S two-channel RCS preamp, theTact-2.2 X two-channel preamp offering RCS on two main and two subwoofer channels, and the TCS MKII ten-channel theater correction system. Each of these units offer advanced RCS technology not available in any other product on the market. Continued research, combined with enormously valuable feedback from our customers has resulted in our exciting new Dynamic Room Correction (DRC)®technology.

Until now,Tact room correction systems have used one target curve that provided full range (20-20,000 Hz) room correction. Once selected, this same target curve (being the same set of correction filters) was used at all listening levels. This approach could not take into account the fact that our sound perception, as illustrated by the Fletcher-Munson curves above, is both frequency and level dependent. Many of our customers solved this problem by utilizing the nine correction presets (available on all our RCS products) to program theirTact systems with nine different target curves, each corresponding to a different listening level. In this way they were able to resolve the equal loudness curve effect by manually switching to a specific target curve as they set their listing level for a particular audio selection.

It was always clear to us that this manual approach should be automated. Unfortunately, processing power (priced within reason) available at the time simply was not up to the challenge of providing room acoustics correction and at the same time dynamically change the target curve (correction filters) as the system’s listening level changed. DRC is the solution