Trinnov Nova vs Sonarworks... what's the real difference?

It’s a Theory, read the papers but unless you are a huge fan of comb filtering in your low end, no. Those pesky laws of physics have this way of showing up when you don’t them to. Anyone who has experience with large scale speaker systems will shake their head at this idea.
Hear is your issue basic phase cancellation during summation. We are going to go back to physics class to diagphrams within one wavelength are going to sum together in the case of LF consider we are talking over 9 meters! So if we have 2 different subs within 32 feet of each other and less than 9 meters apart they are going to sum and all the phase level and distortion differences are going to create all kinds of comb filtering. Even the simple differences in latency because of different DSP is going to cause issues.

Why do you think the original customers of ATC & Volt where live speaker manufacturers? Because when you array say 30 of the same driver you need consistency from driver to driver!

Here is a very basic experiment simply compare the LF of your monitors with a bit of EQ using 2 different EQ’s say an API and an SSL as close as you can to the same EQ point. Now listen to each channel separately and then together, what you hear is comb filtering. Can you correct it with DSP? Well you can get close, but your going to need a ch of correction for each monitor ch and each sub because if you try to correct it via one simple stereo feed you won’t be able to correct the timing phase difference between the different sub. .

I learned this lesson working for some regional SR companies as a kid, guys on the cheap would have some cabinets with JBL some EV and probably something like Fane they would all sound different, system symmetry just made things easier, years later I learned why. Now there is of course one exception to this rule, different models of Meyers will sum because every product Meyer has ever made has the same phase and frequency response within it’s bandwidth, even Hudsonics Aimie’s will sum with a UPA1 or M1D.

Well, like I say, it's important to measure your results and determine whether they work for you. It's easy enough to measure and also likely, if one is able to place everything in an ideal position with respect to the axial modes, that one would be in a better position to understand what needs to/can actually be done to improve response at the listening position. Some degree of comb filtering is going to happen any time you have more than one speaker as far as I understand it, but Geddes's protocol* actually states that the subs a) do not need to be identical, b) are not meant to be working or positioned in stereo (rather instead semi-randomly), and c) are also not meant to operate at identical output levels. It's a different way of doing things and feels very counterintuitive! And that's all I'll say by way of supporting this idea, your mileage may vary. Cheers!

p.s. it's still valid to further time-align the subs in this protocol with something like MiniDSP and some people do, but that is a deeper dive for sure, and we are trying to see how far we can get *before* we start getting super granular like that.  

*For further reading: mehlau.net/audio/multisub_geddes/

Not sure if this has been discussed on the board already...
www.sonarworks.com/soundid-reference/integrations

Looks like Sonarworks has worked hard to set itself up as a big integration partner with several hardware companies. This will compete against the likes of a separate device like Trinnov or ARC or whatever else they want to sell as an added box.

UAD just announced this with their newest interfaces, but it's already going with RME, Lynx, Audient ORIA, AVID MTRX, DAD 32, Merging Anubis, and DSP monitor speakers from Fluid Audio, Wayne Jones Audio, Adam Audio A Series, and Dolby Mastering Suite.

This will be running the Soundreference EQ curves right on the devices' DSP, which means low latency that you can run it full time. Once you are set up you don't have to run Sonarworks system wide or have the plugin in your DAW. No more worries about forgetting to take it off the DAW mix before you print.

I stopped using it a while ago just for headphones, so I'm not familiar with any updates that might impact the differences between Trinnov and Sonarworks. Just know you don't have think about different converter boxes or extra plugins.

So you are using the ARC dac instead of the Lynx or Dangerous? How are you liking that?

With the new option Sonarworks wouldn't run a plugin in the DAW. So hopefully no crashes.

It's not available yet, but the way UAD are talking about it with the new Apollo stuff, it sounds like Sonarworks will. I'm not aware if this is a change with all of these various DSP integrations or just the one with UAD.


UAD is implementing a new bass management feature that will filter certain frequencies going to your satellites vs a sub, and then they say the Sonarworks will handle time alignment. 

Yeah, don’t think it’s doing any phase correction.

The problem, with phase correction is it is very DSP intensive lots of little delays with a band delay.