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What is DSP?
And Why REL Doesn't Use It?
The below text is a transcription of the video.
What is DSP and why doesn’t REL use it? It’s really simple. DSP stands for digital signal processing. It’s nothing more than a tool. First of all, it’s not that we don’t believe in DSP, we disagree with the way it’s implemented in every case that we’ve run into it so far. Doesn’t mean that those aren’t really smart, hardworking engineers. It just means that we’ve not heard it be as good as a good analog filter. So why is that? I strongly suspect that what happens is that when you get into a normal subwoofer company, there are basically two things that suffuse the culture of that company. How loud does it play, and how low does it go? And so when you can take a tool like DSP and what DSP can do, for example it’s not a magical cine cure, but what it allows you to do is an engineer is look at the output. And if you believe that a perfectly flat output is the technical god that you’re bowing down to, and that has a huge number of problems with it in real rooms, by the way, which is why it’s a bad idea. But if you have a culture in your company that says, “Hey man, ours goes down to 19Hz and it’s only whatever, 500 bucks or something”. What you can do is you can use DSP to pull down the energy output at middle and higher frequencies of the bass. That gives you more storage in your power supply. And it means that you can pump up the 20Hz range really loud. And if all you’re trying to do is get that flat line of response and that’s where it was a big problem, then there you go. And what it misses is all the human element.
When you listen to deep voices, when you walk into a room and your footsteps echo around the room ’cause it’s a big room, it’s cavernous. All of those cues are really important to believability in, say, a film. You lose all that. What you get is when Tom Cruise, the cable snaps and he lands, you know, 25 feet down on a concrete floor in pitch darkness with weird little eyes looking at him, and it goes thump really loud. That’s what you get. So you get one thump in a two and a half hour movie, and you lose all the believability of the other two hours and, you know, 29 minutes and 49 seconds. It’s a terrible trade off. We don’t believe in that. We believe that naturalness is what it’s about. And that if you can actually help people get placed into the reality of the movie and forget about life for two hours, two and a half hours, that’s really our job.