[DoctorDyna]

There are a lot of things that correction software can do, for example, "The Ultimate Equalizer" from Bodzio, that you just can't do in Audyssey, at least not the version of Audyssey that's included in the $400-600 receiver category. You could probably do better with MultEQ32 or whatever the fancypants version of Audyssey is, but be prepared to spend a couple thousand dollars on the receiver.

The miniDSP unit is geared more toward designing active crossovers. If you wanted to go the whole nine yards and use separate amplifier channels for all the drivers in all your speakers, it's a great solution, but when you start talking about 7 channel setups, you could be into nearly 20 amplifier channels, depending on how many drivers are in all your speakers.

Now, the thought of having a room correction / eq built in a plugin for xbmc that merely sets EQ parameters and phase relationships would be pretty cool and something that I'd probably have many hours of fun tinkering with

[Livin]

Putting something like this in XBMC is a very little bang for the buck (dev time)... there is a very small % of XBMC users that would actually use it (0.01% by my completely scientific methods) and the benefit would be little to none since "EQing" is only part of the story for room correction - and most people have no clue what any of it means, nor the ear for it. I think most people would prefer to use their system instead of spending hours messing with it.

Much better options...
a) buying software made to do this where the people that developed it have years of expertise and refined the software already
b) buying a receiver with it built-in - these can be had starting at as low as $200 ** BEST OPTION FOR THE MASSES **

[DDDamian]

I'll take the $400 receiver that has a chip & algorythms in it with 10+ years of maturity, tweaking, and the best minds in A/V contributing, over a software version with little to no maturity -- Any day!

Bang on. Audessey and it's brothers has years of dedicated phD work behind it, and actually measures the room you're trying to correct. And it's obviously not realtime, but it's the best they can do.

Giving tons of variables for someone to play with is not likely to get them anywhere good. Most people have no idea what's involved/required, and it requires cost outlay for measurements to "correct for the room". I don't care how good your ear is - you can't "see" room modes and reflections without gear.

The same folks that want to run on a $100 box want $100,000 worth of programming time to end up with a bad result. Beyond the "neat, let's tweak" factor, the best solution for good audio is a pure input signal (XBMC with AE & an all-digital stream) and good audio equipment.

Besides, you can use XBMC w/DSPlayer and FFDShow and do all the convolving, delaying, reverbing you want today. Tell me how much fun you've had and how much better it sounds once you've tweaked all that off-kilter!