Pre-distortion

There's been a lot of buzz lately about pre-distortion: room correction, and speaker correction in particular. The term pre-distortion is my own and it's purposefully tinged with negative guilt, so I suppose I better explain. The word distortion means the alterations of the original waveform, from the pure to the impure. If you clip the sidewall of the parking garage with your car's fender, you distort the car's look. If your room has a bass suckout at 60Hz, you can mangle the incoming music's waveform to have less volume at 60Hz: the end result is flat frequency response in the room. That's pre-distortion. So, why would I lose sleep over pre-distorted waveforms? Because I've spent the last 45 years chasing them down and doing battle with them. I prefer to fix the problems rather than add distortion in the hopes of evening things out. If you leave the speakers flat and fix the room instead, you're likely to have a much better sonic experience. There's more to be said, and we shall consider saying those things in the next few days.