I keep looking for a suitable room EQ for my 5.1 surround studio. I spent a lot of energy into making it work by building treatment, setting up speakers and all of the possible things in the real world. But in the end with a not very large room it is impossible to get there one hundred percent. You are happy getting the reverberations as smooth as possible (rt60). But frequency curve is almost impossible to get straight within +/- 10db with a smaller room like mine. That is why many use an additional room EQ on top of the physical treatment. I know there are things, EQ cannot fix, but that doesn’t mean acoustics can’t be improved by it, especially, if you managed to get the reverberation right.
So, coming back to my quest: it is very hard to find a good solution to do this ...

There are hardware solutions like Trinov, but these are crazy expensive and often involve large latency which is ok for mixing but not for producing with synths and virtual instruments.

There are software solutions, but these are always plugins, so, you only hear corrected audio from your daw and not from other computer sources, which is kind of impractical.

So, I wondered, why is there no hardware solution that remains digital and is very low latency, only to realize, I already have that ... well ... almost!

TotalMix FX is capable of putting DSP effects on every channel and is very low latency. The only problem is, these EQs were not made with room EQ in mind. They would need to have many more bands and possibly also be a different kind of EQ that is suited better for that purpose. Personally, I don’t ever use any of the Total Mix FX l. But I would pay extra, if I could use them for this purpose! I suppose, having enough DSP power for all of these 3-band EQs would be sufficient to be replaced by using more powerful EQs for the output channels only, wouldn’t it?

I think total mix and RME products would be even better then they already are, if more of the features of monitor controllers would be implemented into the hardware and software. And hardware-wise, almost everything needed is already there!
I bought a very expensive monitor controller, just because total mix has no multi channel monitoring section (another thing that would just need a software add-on), bass management, talkback and a physical device to control these features.

All of this plus a room correction software would be a very compelling reason for lots of small to medium studios to use rme hardware. Maybe it wouldn’t work with all Interfaces equally. Maybe you need some kind of add on hardware to make the EW powerful enough - these are technical things I don’t know. But I would love to hear what others would thing about more monitoring features and room EQ with RME and total mix! Both users and staff.