I'm wondering if there is an advantage (or only disadvantages) to having a receiver's internal acoustic calibration software number crunch on a multiple microphone setup vs. one measurement per location. To clarify, is it better to take one measurement at one location and do this 10 times or have 10 microphones to simultaneously conduct the same measurement?

10 microphones might be a little overkill but I could see a 2 or 3 microphone setup being used. Then, instead of having 8 measurement points, you could expand that up to 16-24 points. For example, in an 8 seat theatre, each seat could get the benefit of 3 different measurement points instead of a single location per seat.

Not sure if it is already being done by some manuf. but I'm curious.

Thanks

PC

If you want to calibrate 8 points, and you have 8 microphones, then you have the benefit of correlation between the samples. However, you will need 8 discrete microphone inputs (A/D converters) for that, which would probably be pretty expensive (not to mention the price of 8 microphones).

In general, the impulse response you get out of a single microphone measurement will largely be consistent enough that there's no big gain from doing all the microphones at the same time -- compared to the variation you get when different people are in different seats, wearing different clothing...