I don’t think anyone said it was easy. Who told you that acoustic measurement was easy? Why were you expecting it to be easy?

I haven’t watched that clip, but here’s one I watched before and was well explained:
https://youtu.be/ihOMKQ3i2OM

As someone looking to present some technical information may I ask why people are looking at a video to learn how to use REW rather than reading the manual. This is not intended as criticism but to help understand the value people may see in a video format vs a more written one when it comes to learning technical information.

I followed this video to the T and it helped me to set up my room corrections - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ev1bSSL8tRA

It is definitely not as easy as Denon but once set correctly the results are much better.

Than don’t get a mic. No one said it would be easy.

REW is to learn acoustics of your room. It’s not that hard if you are willing to put some time and effort in.

But if you’re lazy you could just use the MiniDSP, a mic and Dirac and never touch REW.

Most of the stuff that guy goes through you only have to do once. You don’t need an SPL meter so that part is optional, you just need enough signal to make a measurement. I would look at the manual for calibration and measurement procedures.

Because REW can work with any mic, sound card, computer, amp etc, there are more settings to play with. IT is also much more powerful than some AVR calibration and can give you information you can use anywhere. The AVR already knows the mic sensitivity and gain settings to use so none of those settings are really necessary.

Doing speaker measurements should be gated (maybe 5ms) to remove reflections rather than long ones like this guy does. Room measurements are long like he shows.

from skimming that video - you can pretty safely skip the sections “calibrate your soundcard”, “calibrate input level”, which simplifies the whole process a lot. the important bit starts about 8:55

I thought REW was miserable to use and work in. After struggling with getting REW to do literally anything I got Dirac and haven’t looked back.

This is why I like Dirac Live. Not free, but almost no learning curve compared to REW, and the results are great from my experience.

Well, don’t overcomplicate it. Just get the UMIK-1 and maybe Amazon Basics microphone stand, where you can get it stably where you need to measure. Whatever stand comes with UMIK-1 is tiny to the point of being completely useless, in my opinion. I also do not use the included wind screen on the mic – maybe it would be good idea to do that, if you were to use it for a speaking microphone or outdoors, but I don’t do that. The calibration files are measured without the wind screen on.

I use the 90deg calibration file and I point the mic upwards when I measure. This is somewhat an arbitrary choice, but that way I can do left and right measurements without having to change the mic orientation towards the speaker at near field, I guess. In truth, I mostly do it like this because Genelec’s microphone is also used in vertical orientation and I think it likely more fairly captures the reflective ambience of the room, as even backwall reflections are going to get measured at close to their full strength, rather than being diminished by the microphone’s lack of sensitivity to sounds coming from directly behind it. At least for my unit, the calibration values are also 2-3 dB smaller in the 90 deg file for most of the audible band, so the file is also barely needed at all, which I like.

Ultimately, all you want to know is the frequency response, distortion, group delay, reverb etc. characteristics of your total system so you know where you stand. You don’t really have to work out what your audio interface’s capabilities are first, or whatever that guy is doing. I think basic 512k or 1M sample sweeps will be fine. Label your measurements so you remember whether it was left, right or both together, then apply some smoothing and use the All SPL view to check how the tonality goes for these 3 cases, to get started.

I also don’t use earspiltting sound levels – 70-80 dBSPL is fine by me. It’s enough to see the sweep. For harmonic distortion measurements, you’ll get proprtionally more distortion the louder you go, and I guess minimum of 80 dBSPL is good to check that things are working and nothing is rattling in the room.