Beginners Guide To Dirac Live
What Is Room Correction?
Dirac Live is a form of room correction. If you’ve ever wondered what room correction actually does, it’s pretty straightforward. It’s software that adjusts the sound of your movies or music to suit your room. Real life gets in the way, and most of us can’t build a dedicated cinema room from scratch, so the living room ends up doing double duty as the TV and entertainment space.
Rooms aren’t always perfectly shaped either, and speakers don’t always end up exactly where they should be. All of that has an impact on how things sound. Room correction helps smooth out those issues, using your speakers to compensate for awkward room shapes and less-than-ideal placement, so you get a more balanced and enjoyable listening experience.
What Is Dirac Live?
Dirac Live is what could almost be called audio wizardry designed to help everyone get better sound from their system, not just people with perfectly treated listening rooms or years of setup experience. It doesn’t matter whether you’re running a serious home cinema, a well put together stereo system, or something in between, Dirac Live’s job is to make your system sound more like the music (or movie) and less like the room it’s playing in.
Dirac is named after the famous British physicist Paul Dirac, whose name is linked to the mathematical function that lies at the heart of the company's Dirac Live room correction software. The seeds of the company were sown around 2005 when some of the founders were PhD students at Uppsala University in Sweden. As part of the Signals and System Group, they weren't happy with the way their speakers sounded. Unlike most people in that situation, they had the knowledge and equipment to do something about it. Using the digital signal processing techniques they had learnt, the students came up with a way of improving sound in their environment. This software has now been developed to work across domestic listening rooms, car audio, smartphones and headphones.
How Dirac Live Works In Real Rooms?
The idea is simple, even if the maths behind it definitely isn’t. Dirac Live listens to your speakers the same way you do - from where you actually sit, lounge, or sprawl on the sofa. Using a microphone and a set of test tones, it measures how sound behaves in your space - the boomy bass corner, the spot where vocals get vague, and the reflections bouncing around like an echoey game of pinball. It then builds a correction profile based on those measurements, usually across several seating positions so no one gets the short end of the sonic stick.
Where Dirac Live gets a bit special is that it doesn’t just tweak tone controls and call it a day. It works in both the frequency and time domains, meaning it adjusts not only what you hear, but when you hear it. That timing element is a big deal - it helps tighten bass, sharpen imaging and bring everything into better focus, so instruments and voices feel locked in place rather than drifting about.
You’ll find Dirac Live in a growing number of AV receivers, surround processors, active speakers and some stereo components. Setup is done through friendly, easy to use software on a computer or mobile device, and once you’re finished, the correction filters live inside the hardware. After that, it just quietly does its thing in the background, no constant fiddling required.
The Result: Sound That Finally Fits The Room
The end result isn’t a “wow, that sounds wildly different” moment - and that’s kind of the point. A well-dialled in Dirac Live system sounds calmer, clearer and more confident, like your system has finally settled into the room and made itself at home. It doesn’t change the character of your speakers, it simply helps them behave themselves, so everyone in the room gets to enjoy the best version of the sound. Many of our products now offer the option of Dirac Live from brands like NAD, Denon, Marantz, Arcam, Onkyo and Bluesound so please enquire today about how to make your system sound better in your room. January 2026