The more "this stuff" evolves the more I wonder if the manufacturers aren't getting ahead of themselves. Hard to keep up, at least for me as I just don't have the time to devote to it.
Brief recap: when my wife retired, I moved all audio equipment into a bedroom. It's full of furniture like most functioning bedrooms and also all my pc gear/desks, which is extensive. A difficult room for audio even based on speaker placement alone.
Last December I bought an Onkyo TX-RZ50.
To date I've only ran the Dirac Live "full" speaker adjustment as built into the firmware. But it has made quite the difference. I have an Atmos 7.1.4 setup.
To date on the two occasions I've had a quiet house and the time, I've been unsuccessful in running the Dirac Live from my pc as the software always informs me that I'm not "logged in" to the site, when I most assuredly am. So more time I need to spend to find out how to correct this so I can get the full effect of Dirac and get all my speakers set up properly. The Onkyo is supposed to be able to store 3 profiles if run through the pc software, and the profiles are configurable.
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But backing up to your point on cpu's and processing, too bad some/all processing could not be offloaded somehow to a pc.
Of course that would never happen with Windows, an OS that is dedicated to running legacy programs and sometimes lately seems less designed to increase architectural robustness and more by the whims of grade schoolers.