DSR1 EQ/Time alignment setup
 

Anyone have any experience with this? I messed with it a little bit but none of the changes I made seemed to make a noticeable difference, so I left it at whatever the initial settings are. The app is great but all of the adjustments are beyond my audio setup knowledge and the instructions are abysmal at best.

Time alignment centers the stereo image based on your seating position and makes sure each speakers output meets your ears at the same time. You need a tape measure to set it up. It's an important step for any aftermarket stereo.

I can agree with level matching first. That is important. But setting distance by using your ears is completely inaccurate and an outdated way of doing things. Maybe you could get close with a ton of work but no where near as close as using a tape measure. This method was used back in the 80's before digital signal processors with time and distance alignment existed. Ask any respectable tuner. I strongly suggest no one use this method.

When I decided to add a DSP [Dayton 408] to my system, I knew almost nothing about how to set it up and what to expect. Thanks to folks like dhmcfadin, I have a good working knowledge now. Because this is all basically new to me, I only really know about the initial setting using a tape measure so, I did it that way. This, probably the most important part of the setting. All other settings work off this initial setting as I understand it. At first, I didn't really hear a difference myself thinking it should have some sort of dramatic difference. But, that's not the case at least, from my perspective. It's subtle but, very noticeable as I found out the other day while driving my truck. The placement of instruments and voice are laid out as if you are in the studio sitting in front of the band playing. The separation is superior to anything I've heard from a car stereo and it's all so logical. I have my EQ set how I like it and based on that setting, I can take my initial preset and just change the measurements to set up new presets. I will be adding a 'center' preset and a passenger preset.

Do the measurements, I think if you do that, everything will fall into place as the other settings may be ones you are already familiar with and you know what you are looking for. I plan on doing more refinement using AudioFrog's mic system late on but for now, I just going to leave things as they are and continue my familiarization with the Dayton 408 programing.

One other thing on settings. Pay attention to your speakers frequency responsponse. Your DSP will have a setting for them in each channels high and low level settings. Use the manufacturers frequency range for each speaker for this. It just insures you won't go beyond your speakers freq capabilities. If I'm wrong about this, I'm sure a correction will be made. ;)

You just described the reason for time alignment perfectly.

Like I said, you can get close for sure. And if you have well trained ears, you can further dial everything in after time aligning with a tape measure. But for the untrained ear, to go straight into time aligning by ear won't turn out well.

Time alignment should always be done by actual distance to the same spot for all drivers. After that, centering is done by level matching left and right sides. There are bandpassed pink noise tracks you can play on both sides at the same time to further match output levels side to side.

If you have to change time alignment to level match, then either your TA distance is wrong or you need EQ work.

Read up on a piece of software called REW and using a Dayton mic with your windows laptop to record sweeps and/or pink noise to tune to a particular curve.