A1 Evo Acoustica

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Hi, this is Obsessive Compulsive Audiofile and today I'm introducing you to Acoustica, the latest iteration of the free and powerful sound optimization tool, A1evo. Acoustica is not only acoustically the best version to date, but it's also easier to use than ever with full integration and automation. Whether you're a seasoned user or just getting started, this tutorial will help you unlock the full potential of your setup using A1evo Acoustica. So let's dive in and fire those subs up.

Alright, for the newcomers, first of all what is A1Evo? It's a free and easy to use and even easier with Acoustica. Advanced sound optimization tool for home cinema systems. When I say home cinema, it can optimize also stereo systems as long as there's a subwoofer.

So 2.1 is the bare minimum and it can go up to 16.4 full Dolby Atmos system. From zero to complete and great sounding system, it takes a couple of minutes to complete and you don't need any previous experience with A1Evo or any sort of digital room correction for that matter. It integrates with Room EQ Wizard, a fabulous free tool for digital room correction.

It can use your existing Audyssey measurements, whether they are taken with MultiQ-X or MultiEQ Editor app, or it can use your manual REW measurements. And for the enthusiast, it allows custom target curves as well as highly advanced customization options which a regular user needs in its standard settings, it will give you a near perfect sound. You can see in the last 48 hours since it's being beta tested, these are some of the comments from actual users. What you need to use A1Evo? You don't need the app, neither MultiEQ-X or the Editor app. Acoustica has its own communication interface. You need a compatible Denon or Marantz AV receiver.

No other brand will work with A1Evo. You need at least one subwoofer as I said before and the compatible models are exactly the ones listed here. If your AVR is compatible with the Editor app, then it's compatible with Acoustica.

If not, it's not. Also you need individual measurements for each of your speakers and subwoofers in your system. There's nothing extra you have to do and that's basically all you need. Now let me show you step by step how you use it.

There will be a link to this folder in the video description. This is where you download A1Evo Acoustica for your operating system. I use Windows so I will download this one. I will explain what the other files are for. But basically there's Linux, macOS for both Intel and M series and Windows versions. Unable to scan for viruses, download anyway.

Okay the zip file, you save it wherever you want. Let me make a new folder here. Let's say "look at video" and download it here.

Okay suspicious download. Because it's a Node.js program with lots of JavaScript and opening other files in the PC, it's very likely to get false positive for virus detections. You might need to turn off your Windows Defender virus protection to download it or download all of the folder. Then I think it will not give you these warnings. Okay it's downloaded.

Extract it here. And this is the tool. Just one file, nothing else.

And to show you that it's actually virus free, I'm gonna check it with VirusTotal. This is the best known virus program. Confirm uploads. As you see it doesn't have any wires in it. This website checks it with every single virus detection tool out there. And none of them have detected it positive.

Then you run it. Double click. Windows keeps still protecting for it but run anyway.

And there you go. This is the tool. It can discover your AVR in the network.

Option 1. Which we should do. Searching network for AVR receiver. It didn't find. It will normally find but my AVR has locked itself during the test today so I know it's IP address. You can find your AVR's IP address in its stack menu in the network settings.

In case it doesn't find your AVR, it's actually very capable. If it finds multiple AVR's you can select one and you can also manually enter the IP address. And once you enter it, it finds it and it's giving you its name just to confirm because there may be more than one. And you say yes. And done. You will see that here it's already now a receiver config.avr file.

It's a JSON file where it has read all of the settings and show you. This is the online JSON editor and if you put it here you will see that at the moment I turned off my utmost just to make the test quicker with just five speakers. It read my Marantz. AVR receiver is at the moment off. It's not even turned on and now I have all the speakers, amp- Assign, everything else that the optimizer needs. So it saves this file and you only have to do this once.

Next time I run it, if it finds this one in the folder, it's not gonna ask you to create one but you can recreate. As you see the menu has changed from generate to recreate. And after that if rew is installed on your PC, all we have to do is go come to option 2 and start optimization. I didn't even open rew so it's opening it for me. It's gonna start rew and start this API server to lots of users before was having problems with forgetting starting the API server of REW.

Now this is taken care of. So here is REW and here is A1 Acoustica. It requires measurements in REW that match with this speaker profile of your system which means you have to have measurements for each of your speakers in REW. As long as you have that, it will start optimization.

You can use your manual rew measurements. For manual measurements, I won't go into the details of that in this video but you can watch next week's video where I have gone into full detail of how to use rew for manual speaker measurement. You will need obviously Atmos REW measurement sweeps which are linked here in the folder. Here you have for every 16 channels of Atmos sweeps which you can play with VLC media player. So you can use your upmost speakers also.

You can also measure your Atmos speakers. And for that you need VLC media player. You will see that here in the A1 Acoustica here.

This is the link to download latest rew beta. This is the link to download VLC media player. There is a Facebook group with over 2000 members where you can ask questions. They are very helpful. You can ask under the video comments to me. Now, let me first open some measurements that I have for my system which are here.

I think this one. So once you have your measurements in rew, this is one way that I had a saved rew file with my measurements. I can start doing the optimization. Or let's say you have an Audyssey measurement taken by the Editor app from the past like this one. As you see you can use this button and all the measurements in that .ady file, 52 of them,

are now in REW and also saved here as rew and that. And you can start optimization with that. But obviously this is somebody else's .ady file just for my tests and the speaker configuration here.

As you can see he has a center speaker and from here I don't. Ask me why I'm not using a center speaker but eventually everybody will ditch their center speakers. Anyway, this guy also has two subs. I have only one.

So, this is another way. This can also optimize extract .mqx. But if you're doing your own measurements with REW then you don't need any of this. You just measure them. You just name them from the top.

The measurements at the top should be the central listening position measurements and there is no other restriction. You can just keep naming them as you wish as long as they contain FL, C, FR at the beginning which are the official names for the speakers and you can just optimize. Now let's go back to my measurements. As you see I'm switching to SPL &Phase tab because this runs faster and safer because here it has to draw a lot of graphics during the optimization process which is not efficient.

So try to keep rew in SPL&Phase tab. Now the options. I'm not going to go through the options at this stage. Let me just start optimization. It already determined crossover frequencies and speaker distances, optimal distances here and crossover frequencies here. Now it's creating filters for Audyssey Flat.

And it's finished. When it's finished it generates a .oca calibration file and you have to save it in where your acoustic file is. Also reports here.

And if you save it somewhere else you always have the option to enter the path to this calibration file. And then you can also save the log, this log here for future reference. Let's save it. This doesn't need to be in any particular folder but let's also save it there. Now let's see what is in the folder. There is A1 Acoustica of course.

There is the .oca calibration file. It's an other JSON file...By the way, if you wonder what it is. As you see very similar to the configuration file but this one has filters in it. And this one has distances and speaker volume levels and crossover frequencies. Also for subwoofer here.

And lpf, low pass filter for LFE channel. So this is the settings that you need to send to your AV receiver for optimized sound. Your program is still running here in parallel. So what you do now is go to 3 and transfer calibration.

It will check for every OCA file in the folder. There is only one at the moment. So just press enter and it will pick up the most recent OCA file. Again connecting to the AVR.

It's connected powering it on. I don't know if you could hear the relay clicking. And checking if my AVR has preset support unfortunately it does not. But here you can also select the preset that you want to send the calibration to. With multiple presets you can send two different calibrations. Also Acoustica sends one setting for Audyssey Flat which is the normal listening filters.

And one setting for different settings for Audyssey Reference. So even if you don't have presets you have two different calibrations. And Audyssey Reference calibration is for low volume listening. From low volume listening at night you can't always listen at reference levels.

And the naming is kind of confusing but Audyssey Flat is for reference level, your normal listening level. And Audyssey Reference is for low volume listening which should be around 12 to 25 dB lower than your usual level. And it's all finished. Done.

And when you start playing your system right now you will have a very different sound to what it was before the calibration. Feel free to test. That's basically it.

But now let me show you some options. And if you want to check your AV receiver now which you can do like this. There's a WEB UI.

As you see it's set my fronts small, subwoofer one and surround small and distances. Are all set according to the findings in the optimization. You can check here that for example front speaker distance is 275 and here it's 275. By the way the distances are not going to be always the same as the actual distances. With subwoofer it's always going to be longer by the way because of the delays, the filters in sub-woofer cause. But also these distances are not important.

It's only the time differences between speakers that Acoustica works with. So they don't really mean much. If your front speaker is at 4 meters rather than 275 don't worry about it. It's about this distance, 2 centimeter distance between two that matters. And with that Acoustica is very precise I can assure you.

Time levels and crossovers everything set including bass, LFE for LFE to 200. So now it's all set and you can start listening and enjoying your system. But if you want to for example close this and rerun the optimization. Go to 2 and by the way let me show you also the results of this one.

You can see the clear selections like this. You can see the optimized calibration. This is going to be your front head speaker final.

This is going to be your front right speaker, SRA and subwoofer And this was how they were before optimization. So you can also save that as your result but it's not necessary. You can always produce this very quickly. As long as your measurements are the same the results will always be the same depending on the options you choose. Now let's remove all and then go back to my original measurements. Now you can adjust subwoofer EQ max boost.

I suggest keeping it at zero but you can use peaking filters too to boost the tips. But deep boosting is not a good way, a good sounding optimization. In fill just lift sub-volume up and down so you will have less dips for example. You can also use this if you took sub-woofer measurements off by 10 dB because with many measurements it's quite common. People forget to use LFE -10. LFE measurements by default are 10 dB louder than speaker measurements.

Dolby has 10 dB loudness embedded in LFE channel. So if you forgot to measure your subwoofer 10 dB lower then you can use the 10 dB here as the offset. That's the only reason there is 10 dB here otherwise it's really too excessive to use 10 dB. Now night listening volume offset is set to 18 dB by default which means if you're watching your movies that there are 90 dB let's say which is -15 in these receivers and at night you put it down to -33 from -15, okay? Then you should keep it at -18. So how much lower is your low volume listening offset? If it's just 12 dB then bring it here. -12, -15, -18, -20, -25.

This setting will increase bass and high frequency level according to ISO 226 2023 equal loudness contour standards. Very precise, better than dynamic EQ and you shouldn't turn dynamic EQ on. Just offset here according to your taste and listening level and when you switch your amplifier to Audyssey 'Reference' that will be for your low volume listening. You will suddenly hear increasing bass and high frequencies.

So don't use this mode with regular volumes unless you're a real bass freak. That is where you want to listen and reference is only for night listening at low volumes at like low volumes like 25 dB lower volumes okay. Here you can cap crossover search frequency. Normally it searches all the range available from 40Hz to 250Hz. You better leave them also at default but some people like to adjust their crossover frequencies to what they think is right.

So you can do that. If you take this one, this option, it will check for speaker polarities if there is any speaker out of phase and it will also correct them. You don't have to do anything. It's not always accurate but it's as accurate as it can be. If you get a positive just check your cabling, make sure that there is nothing wrong and if every connection is correct, every speaker cable is correctly connected then don't use it in the next optimization.

If you find some connection is really wrong don't change it physically but just use this one during optimization until you swap cables at one point because this will automatically switch the polarity of the speaker. And this is for DIY subwoofers or very powerful subwoofers which can go like below 16 Hz without losing any SPL. A1 is able to detect your subwoofer roll-off frequency as long as it is 16 Hz and over but if it's below that it is not very reliable so this is for people who know their subwoofer roll-offs very well or who have a custom subwoofer that they have built themselves. So here you can select roll-off frequency goes down to I think 10Hz minimum and roll-off shape also from Butterworth to Linkwitz Riley and Bessel and what have you.

So you have all these options. This is quite complex but people who know their sub roll will understand what is being done here. Normally you don't need to use any of those.

That's all the options in it. Let's talk over 'Preferences' that you have to do. First of all go to view when you install REW, change maximum measurements to 1000. Just in case.

And 'Analysis'. Go to 'Equalizer' normally this is ticked 'drop filters if gain is small'. Untick this one. The API server normally stopped and you start it.

And if you're using your own microphone just make sure you add mic calibration file here. And sound card if you're using ASIO, if you're using your own measurements you have to do some settings here which I explained in the 'Nexus' video but for Acoustica to work all you have to do is change the number of measurements here which will require a REW restart and in a equalizer untick this one, nothing else. And if you don't even want to do that here in the download folder there is a REW preferences file if you download this one and here you go to REW and load preferences file. If you select the downloaded file all the settings in REW will be set automatically without you doing anything.

And also A1 Evo when it's starting REW it starts REW with API server running so you don't also have to go to API and start server. There are known problems with the transfer tool at the moment. Let's mention these. If you have four subwoofers and one of the new models, it tends to mute two of them so until this is resolved you can't really use Acoustica. Acoustica's transfer tool at least.

And with certain models also reference filters are not working I think. But the good thing is it is available on GitHub, totally open source and developers are invited to fix these problems because you need to have this particular model to really test it properly. I can only test my own and as much as friends in the forums give feedback. But I completely opened it including the transfer files and everything here so developers are very welcome to improve at least the transfer function. Don't use GitHub for asking user problems for the tool. For that there is the Facebook group, there are forums and there is also the YouTube comments.

Here, please use it for development. It needs a measurement tool. We are now aware that we can use Audyssey measurement tool manipulated to actually even individually measure subs. Many of these receivers can do directional bass. By the way if you are measuring manually and you have more than one sub put your amplifier to directional bass mode during measurement so you can measure individually each sub.

Otherwise you have to swap RCA cables during measurements because you have to have individual measurements if you have multiple subwoofers that's important. But we know that we can even override that and measure subs individually using Audyssey measurements. But I didn't have time to write that part and hopefully somebody will add this or I will do it if I can find the time.

So this is in the to-do list. So, compatibility to all the models and a measurement tool. For example someone developed already here is also open source and in GitHub a tool for automated REW measurements.

So opportunities are infinite. The optimization technique is very sophisticated and the best yet. I'm pretty certain you will all love the results as long as your filters work.

So let me know in the comments if you find the tool useful and if you run into any issues. What else can I explain? Okay the target care library as you see in the video download folder there are lots of target curves. Download this and use a custom target care. Evo Acoustica is good for a standard calibration but if you find the bass too heavy you can switch to another curve.

A lot of people are doing their custom target curves lately. Before you start optimization you have to go to EQ, target settings and here 'house curve' and select one of the curves in this target curve library or a custom curve that you designed. That's important to start optimization it will give you an error otherwise. What else? Acoustica is capable of hacking the 6 meter maximum distance limit in Denon/Marantz receivers. You can use up to 7.35 but

there is a trick with that. If your calibration optimization use the limit higher than 6 meters it will work but only until you go in the setup menu and try to edit distance settings. If you try to edit them then it's going to cap them back to 6 meters. So if you get a warning during optimization that Acoustica is using a higher limit than normal for your system then do not go and edit speaker distances in your receiver. And another thing I should tell you: don't trust Web UI! It has lots of bugs.

Let me go again. For example speaker distances do not update in Web UI. So you might send the calibration and see here that nothing has changed. This is because Web UI doesn't update. And one last warning is double check your 'amp assign' configuration after the filters are transferred.

Make sure that it's the same. Because especially with external amplifiers I see that my pre-out fronts switch to pre-out rears randomly. All you have to do is switch it back and then it will work. And this is also valid for the cases where multiple subs are muted. You just go turn them back on. Hopefully all these problems will be sorted very soon.

And that's all for today. Enjoy your sound and Good-bye!

2025-04-25 08:54

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