Hello from Belgium

Welcome. What are your thoughts on the MiniDSP? I have been tempted by one.

I guess you will be in touch if you want to benefit from the European loan scheme.

Regarding correcting the room modes, I quickly realised that my only option would be to resort to room correction. As our living room/sitting area is where I listen to music, adding physical accoustical correction was out of the question, thus I had to look into a device to help me with this.

I first tried a Dspeaker device, which I was able to buy used, and that already convinced me of its use in my situation. Later on I got a Micromega M150, which is an integrated amp (and quite a good one) with built-in room correction. When going back to hifi seperates, I settled on the SHD studio for the amount of control it offered me in tweaking the correction to tweak it to my own preferences. All in all it was very easy to setup, the most time of that went to measuring the room. After that is was just a question of playing around with the correction curves until satisfied. The internet was really helpful in educating me on that subject. 

It has been really helpful in smoothening out the room modes (of course within the limits of physics). I don´t own a set of golden ears, but imho the effect of the correction can be mostly heard by a way better stereo image with more accurately placed and sharper defined instrument positioning (if that makes any sense)