Dirac Active Room Treatment (ART) comes to the Tonewinner AT600 on 21 October 2026. The AT600 already ships with Dirac Live Room Correction and Bass Control, and ART completes the set. All three licences are included in the price of the processor.
If you are specifying a processor for a serious home cinema, this changes what the AT600 can do for bass, which is where most rooms are weakest.
What Dirac ART is
Conventional room correction treats each speaker on its own. It measures the speaker and the room, then applies a filter to flatten the frequency response and tidy the timing.
ART goes a step further. Dirac describes it as a technology that unites all the speakers in your system to manage the acoustic challenges of your room. It treats the speaker array as a collaborative system. Other suitable speakers and subwoofers are used to help correct each main channel, rather than leaving every channel to fight the room alone.
In practical terms, Dirac says ART is designed to:
- Manage decay time, so sound does not linger in the room and muddy the low end.
- Deliver a cleaner, more controlled soundstage, with improved clarity, detail and focus.
- Provide many of the benefits of physical panels and diffusers without changing how the room looks.
The process is measurement-led. You gather data with the Dirac Live app and a measurement microphone, and ART analyses how sound reflects and decays in your room. The resulting filters are then applied by the processor during playback. ART requires Dirac Live Room Correction, and if your system has subwoofers it also needs Bass Control. The AT600 has both.
ART is not a replacement for good room design. Placement, speaker selection and sensible acoustic treatment still matter. It is an additional tool, and a powerful one.
What it means on the AT600
The AT600 is a 16-channel processor with Dolby Atmos, DTS:X and 8K video support. It handles up to 9.1.4 or 7.1.6 layouts and supports up to three subwoofers (one on XLR, two on RCA).
That channel count matters for ART. According to Tonewinner’s confirmation, the AT600 supports a full 16 x 16 processing matrix. That gives up to 240 support connections between channels (16 x 16 minus the 16 direct paths). The miniDSP Tide 16 , which we also supply, offers the same full-matrix capacity. The practical benefit is headroom. In a larger system, with many speakers and several subwoofers, the processor is less likely to force you to switch off useful support paths, unlike some competitors which are limited to circa 100 paths.
More capacity is not automatically better sound. What you gain depends on the room, the speakers and how the system is calibrated.
The firmware update
ART is enabled by a firmware update. Depending on the firmware your unit shipped with, you may need to update it before ART becomes available.
Tonewinner publishes an update guide for the AT600. In outline, you prepare a USB drive, disconnect the HDMI cable, and let the update run without powering the unit off. Follow the steps in the official AT-600 software update guide and download the files from Tonewinner’s firmware page .
If you would rather not do it yourself, get in touch and we will advise.
Where calibration comes in
ART is only as good as the measurements behind it. Mic positions, subwoofer levels, speaker grouping and the choice of which speakers are allowed to support which channels all affect the result. Getting those wrong can leave a capable processor sounding average.
This is what we do. Kalibrate is THX-certified and a CEDIA member, and we can calibrate the equipment we sell. Some of our calibration work is for systems installed by other companies, so we see exactly what can go wrong when a good processor is set up without proper measurement.
If you buy your AT600 from us, you get a supplier who understands the processor and the room it is going into. If you already own one, our calibration service may cover systems supplied elsewhere.
Launch offers
- Free measurement microphone. A miniDSP UMIK-1 USB measurement microphone is included with your order. It is added automatically when you put the AT600 in your basket. Dirac calibration needs an external microphone, and the UMIK-1 is the one we recommend.
- Limited-time price offer. A launch offer is available for a limited time and is applied automatically in the basket.
Order the AT600
The Tonewinner AT600 8K Processor with Dirac is available now from Kalibrate. See the full specification and order on the AT600 product page .
Weighing it against the Tide 16? We stock both, and we will tell you which suits your room and system. Call us on 01424 559695, email sales@kalibrate.co.uk or use our contact page .
To follow Dirac’s own announcements, you can sign up for updates on the Dirac AT600 page .