Hybrid IIR + FIR Room Correction

How DecayCore combines narrow IIR biquad cuts with FIR correction for stubborn room modes in the bass region.

Sometimes one or two bass resonances keep drawing attention to themselves, whatever record you put on. Hybrid IIR + FIR adds a small set of narrow IIR peaking EQ cuts to DecayCore’s normal FIR workflow for those stubborn room modes. It is optional; a well-behaved bass response does not need extra filters just because there is a checkbox available.

In brief

Hybrid mode assigns supported narrow bass cuts to IIR filters and leaves broadband magnitude and phase work to FIR. Deploy both stages together.

What it is

Standard FIR correction distributes correction energy across the entire filter length. For very narrow, high-Q room modes — common in small or acoustically untreated rooms — a long FIR filter may not be the most efficient tool. An IIR biquad peaking filter can resolve a narrow resonance precisely, with no minimum tap-count requirement.

The hybrid approach uses both:

How it works

When hybrid IIR is enabled, DecayCore:

  1. Detects room modes in the configured bass frequency range using confidence and group-delay excess criteria.
  2. Checks which confirmed modes remain after the bounded FIR magnitude correction.
  3. Moves the supported FIR cut into a Peaking EQ biquad and compensates that transferred part in the FIR.
  4. Adds a bounded, uncompensated residual cut only when the remaining mode independently passes the confidence, group-delay, priority, voice-risk, and residual-authority guards.
  5. Exports the IIR biquad parameters in the CamillaDSP YAML configuration alongside the FIR convolver block.

This keeps the IIR and FIR responsibilities separated while allowing verified residual modes to receive additional narrow-band reduction. The combined IIR cut never exceeds the configured maximum or the supported source-mode height.

When to use

Consider hybrid IIR when:

Be more conservative or leave it disabled when:

Output and CamillaDSP deployment

When hybrid IIR produces biquads, they are added to the exported CamillaDSP YAML configuration as Peaking EQ filter entries alongside the FIR convolver block.

Important: the IIR and FIR must both be active in your CamillaDSP pipeline for the hybrid correction to work as intended. If you load only the FIR WAV without the IIR biquads, the transferred modal correction and any verified residual reduction will be missing.

Verify your CamillaDSP pipeline includes both stages before finalizing the deployment.

Key parameters

Parameter Default Description
enabled false Enable or disable hybrid IIR preconditioning
max_filters_per_channel 3 Maximum number of IIR biquad cuts per channel
min_freq_hz 20 Hz Lowest frequency considered for IIR modal detection
max_freq_hz 200 Hz Highest frequency considered for IIR modal detection
min_peak_db 4.0 dB Minimum peak height required to qualify for an IIR cut
min_q 3.0 Minimum allowed Q for designed biquads
max_q 12.0 Maximum allowed Q for designed biquads
max_cut_db 6.0 dB Maximum combined transfer + residual cut depth per biquad
min_confidence 0.30 Minimum confidence required at the mode frequency
min_gd_excess_ms 10.0 ms Minimum group delay excess required for mode detection
min_cut_priority 0.0 Minimum cut priority score required to place a filter

These parameters are available in the Advanced tab under the hybrid IIR tuning section.