I wasn’t super impressed with Audyssey MultEQ-X in my previous article – simply because of the lack of core technology upgrades. However, that isn’t to say that MultEQ-X isn’t worth your time. Let’s have a look at some of the core functionality that I personally find useful and exciting. Comment below as to the features you find useful and that made a difference in your setup!
1. Ability to See Individual Speaker Measurements
This one goes hand in hand with the next two points but we have to start here. Being able to see individual speaker measurements per position is key to be able to find problematic positions or problematic speakers (e.g. the sub measurements) within those positions. It’s a great tool for selection of measurement positions or to see which speakers to exclude / delete altogether.
2. Enable / Disable Measurement Positions
You could measure let’s say all 15-20 positions within your listening space and then try to include / exclude different positions to see what the resulting frequency response is. This is easily seen within the application as it shows the combined response according to the selected measurements. This is time saving in the sense that you have done all the measurements and you can get down to doing listening tests by trying different combinations of measurement positions.
Of course you could be more scientific about it and see how the speaker response varies by position and decide on whether you value better imaging or a more even frequency response between seats. Again, there is some guidance in Secrets of Audyssey on how grouping mic positions differently will result in better imaging or more even frequency response. You can try and create your own mic positions as well.
What I will say is that people often forget varying the height of measurements which can result in over-correction in some cases. With MultEQ-X you have more measurement positions to play with (upto 32), so try and variate the height of the measurements.
3. Ability to Delete Individual Speaker Measurements
This is a huge one in my opinion. Why? Because the best measurement positions for your main speakers aren’t necessarily the best measurement positions for your subwoofer! This particular feature allows you to exclude measurement positions for your subs where the subwoofer response isn’t characteristic of the subwoofer response at exactly your ears.
This is pretty critical because Audyssey – when following the manual to the letter in terms of microphone positioning – can kill your sub response. This is because subwoofer response can wary pretty wildly even just 30cms away from your listening positions. There are ways around this – such as utilising multiple subwoofers and the quite brilliant Multi-Sub Optimiser, however even then you cannot fully optimise for behind or in front of the sofa when you are focusing on your listening positions.
I do give 4 microphone positioning options in Secrets of Audyssey. The tighter patterns are the least likely to kill your sub response. So if you don’t want to fork out for MultEQ-X, it is worth a shot to start there. However, I do think that using MultEQ-X you’d be able to fine-tune even those patterns and selectively disable the sub measurements for the most problematic listening positions.
4. Re-measure Individual Speakers
Haven’t you had to re-do your Audyssey calibration from scratch just because you moved one or two speakers? Wouldn’t it be great if you could just re-measure those speakers? Maybe you even just want to do a quick and dirty ‘cos friends are coming over so you’re hoping to get away with just 3 measurement positions for that one speaker you moved!
Well, with MultEQ-X, now you can. You load up your saved project, quickly re-measure 3 positions for the speaker you moved, delete the rest of the measurements for that one speaker (but not the others) and bam, you are ready to upload the data into the AVR. Friends are here, time to watch a movie.
What is great about it is that all your other speakers still sound as amazing and sublime as your most perfect calibration before. You’ll deal with perfecting this one speaker after your friends are gone, but it doesn’t sound bad anyway!
Some might be surprised that I didn’t mention the fact that you can edit your own curve and introduce a house curve. This wasn’t an absent-minded omission on my part if you are wondering, and you can read my article on The Big Problem with House Curves if you’d like to know my view on this.
What are your favourite features? Let me know by commenting below!
MultEQ-X User Guide
Accessible here.
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I am using Multeq X a while now, but i don’t find the feature to remeasure an individual speaker (like my sub) without doing all of them again?
Can you describe in detail how it works? Thanx!
Hi Dennis,
You need to right-click on a measurement and a context menu will appear that should have the option to repeat it…
I ask Audyssey support and they told me this feature is not supported by my denon x3600h, only on higher models.
I just had a look and sounds like they are right. It’s one feature that’s not supported by all AVRs. A bit bizarre but ok.