Swedish digital audio pioneer Dirac, and McIntosh, a revered American manufacturer of high-end home audio and home theater components, have embarked on a collaboration to make the award-winning Dirac Live Room Correction solution available to McIntosh customers through the Dirac Live-enabled MHT300 Home Theater Receiver. The two audio giants are showcasing the MHT300 to the US residential AV market for the first time at CEDIA 2023.
According to Fredric Tapper, Dirac’s Vice President of Home & Pro Audio, the first-time collaboration is a testament to each brand’s continued innovation and growing consumer demand for immersive home theater experiences.
“McIntosh is renowned as one of the leading makers of high-end home audio and home theater equipment, and by working with Dirac to integrate the sophisticated Dirac Live software into the new MHT300, we are offering McIntosh users an even greater level of realism and immersion for all their favorite films and music,” Tapper said. “At CEDIA 2023, we’re excited to demonstrate how the best sound system is one that transports the listener into the scene or recording studio. Dirac Live is helping deliver that experience by ensuring MHT300 owners get the best audio experiences out of their systems, regardless of speaker locations, room size, or furniture placement.”
Powered by patented technologies, Dirac Live is the market-leading room correction solution. It automatically addresses common acoustic challenges that all home audio systems have, but hardware alone can’t address – or takes too much time, expertise, or cost to do so. Dirac Live allows users to easily achieve dramatically enhanced sound experiences to hear the best possible sound from their home theater systems.
“As our collaboration develops, we hope to unveil more Dirac-enabled McIntosh products,” Tapper added, “all of which will combine the best of each company’s technologies to help customers get the most out of their home theater spaces.”
The collaboration furthers Dirac’s market penetration and strengthens its status as the leading provider of cutting-edge room correction software. The McIntosh MHT300 Home Theater Receiver is a 7.2 channel AVR with 32-bit DACs that provides up to 150 watts per channel simultaneously for up to 1,050 total watts of precision engineered audio.
The Dolby® Atmos and Dolby DTS:X™ compatible receiver supports 8K/60Hz and 4K/120Hz video and features a range of modern connections including HDMI, delivering bandwidth of 40 Gpbs and an eARC HDMI channel for audio return.
“We are excited to collaborate with Dirac to offer our customers the tremendous advantages of Dirac Live on the MHT300 Home Theater Receiver,” stated Charlie Randall, McIntosh President. “Dirac Live furthers our goal of heightening our customers’ audio experience for everything they watch or listen to. By removing unwanted effects introduced by the room environment, MHT300 owners will be immersed in every sonic detail of their favorite content.”
The interaction between a home theater system and the physical layout of a room has a significant impact on audio quality. Dirac Live Room Correction digitally compensates for the room’s impact on audio performance to enable a sound experience previously only possible in a professional studio.
Dirac Live Room Correction accomplishes this through a patented mixed-phase impulse response correction technology that corrects not just magnitude response, but also time domain – which is exclusive to Dirac Live and critical for creating accurate staging, clarity, and tight bass.
Dirac Live Room Correction also generates an auto target curve based on the sound system’s unique measurements, which makes it easier for users to get even better sound quality from their system automatically. This auto target curve is then fully customizable so users can get their speakers to sound exactly how they want.
Dirac Live is used by world-renowned musicians, sound engineers, high-end brands, and commercial cinemas. The company’s suite of audio optimization solutions is also leveraged by many of the industry-leaders across the automotive, HiFi, headphone, and studio markets, such as NIO, Volvo, Polestar, BYD, Klipsch, and ASUS, among others.