You can spend as much as you like on speakers and amplifiers, and still have your sound held back by pesky old physics.
Very few of us live in recording studios, and many of us can’t or don’t want to start putting carpet on the walls to get the same sound-dampening effect. Most rooms that are home to decent speakers have no sound treatment at all. If you live with a partner, you may well be lucky to be allowed those speakers at all.
It can be hard to tell whether the issues you’re hearing are due to the room or the speakers. This is one reason I’ve always preferred reviewing headphones to full-size speakers. There’s more of a level playing field.
But if you want to really hear what your home audio setup can do in 2026, an audiophile remodel isn’t the only solution. You can also try room correction, a form of equalization that attempts to counter the effects your room is having on the sound you actually hear.
You don’t necessarily need to change your current setup either. You can use a standalone room correction box instead – which is what I recently did, with impressive results.
Cheat your way to perfection
One solution comes from home studio and pro audio specialist Audient, the Oria Mini ($299 / £249 / AU$479). It’s a little middle-man box that sits between your music source and your speakers, and is designed to slot into most setups with no headaches.
The one snag is that it’s really made for studios, home and pro, rather than someone’s living room – and is primarily for stereo setups, with or without a subwoofer. There’s nothing stopping you from using the Oria Mini for classic home speakers, though.
Just make sure you have the right cable for the job. It has 6.35mm inputs and outputs (plus an optical input), so if you pick up a dual TRS 6.35mm-to-phono cable or two from Amazon, you’ll be good to go.
But I actually have a humble home studio setup, so I used that for my first test of this hardware rather than involving my home cinema gear. I have a pair of cheap-but-effective JBL LSR305 monitors, powered speakers that can plug directly into the Audient Ora Mini over a 6.35mm connection.
The annoying part of these speakers is that they are rear-ported. And like most folks who live in humble apartments, I don’t really have the room to give them quite the space they need to breathe at the back. Bad news for fans of clean bass. They also live in a room and are so prone to emphasizing bass boom that I’ve had to stop doing any serious listening in it.
How room correction works
So can the Audient Ora Mini have a crack at fixing things?
The process involves plugging in a bundled microphone into your laptop or PC (so you will need a suitable audio interface) and letting the little guy ‘listen’ at a whopping 35 spots both at and around your final listening position.
This software uses audio clicks from the speakers to determine the microphone’s position in 3D space, prompting you to move the microphone to a position shown on your laptop screen until it’s in the right spot.
And then? In classic calibration fashion, you’ll hear a double frequency sweep – low to high – that checks what, well, ‘sound’ sounds like in that exact position. Repeating this 35 times is a recipe for a sore arm if you don’t have a suitable mic stand. But you’ll be done within 20 minutes.
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The result is mostly exactly what I was hoping for. Audient’s Oria Mini found a significant peak at 140Hz and a less pronounced one at 340Hz. And it spits out an EQ profile to negate them, and you fiddle with the rest of the sound to meet a “reference” profile.
Toggling the corrective profile on and off, it instantly fixes that bass boom, that bloat. And well into my second decade of writing about and reviewing sound tech, this kind of bass and mid-bass issue has become my worst, or at least most common audio ‘ick’, to borrow a bit of dating terminology.
You can also customize the results with your own EQ tweaks, while the ‘reference and ‘Dolby’ presets offer studio-style and slightly more bass-weighted profiles.
Back to the living room
My main aim was really to give the same treatment to my floor stander speakers, though, a large pair of Cadence Audio Anina hybrid electrostatic speakers from India.
These very speakers turn 20 in 2026, and while they are a rare and impressive pair, I’ve always found the woofers they use to accompany their radar-like electrostatic high-frequency panels are a bit thick and bloated-sounding. At least in my living room.
I had intended to use the Audient Oria Mini with these speakers, too. But I was unable to get the cables in time, so I got hold of an Anthem receiver with tech you’re actually more likely to use to customize your speakers’ sound.
Dirac, Anthem’s ARC, and Audyssey are among the best-known room calibration methods. They are found in many of the best home receivers. Check yours in case it’s there, and you never realized. These forms of sound modulation do a similar job to the Audient box, but with a focus on a more mainstream audience and proper multi-channel audio.
The process? It is pretty similar to the Audient one, but with a lot less manual labour involved. You don’t need to account for 35 mic positions, just those of a handful of places where people are likely to sit in the room.
The results are even better than they were with the JBL LSR305. Funnily enough, 30kg-a-pop speakers that sold for several thousand dollars back in the day have greater scope for sounding awesome than a budget pair of JBL studio monitors. The soundstage opens up hugely; the gumming up of the works that happens when you have too much mid-bass is gone, and music sounds so much more transparent and natural.
Will you get the same results with your setup? Maybe. Maybe not. It all depends on your room, your speakers, and the room correction technique you use. I’ve clearly had great results with Audient’s Oria Mini and Anthem’s ARC Genesis, and have heard similarly positive things about DIRAC. Give it a go in 2026 if your equipment and budget allow.
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