Dirac has confirmed expanded Dirac Live support across Marantz's newly announced CINEMA Series 2 receivers, with the licensing going live on August 10. The headline for anyone shopping the middle of the range is that the CINEMA 60 Series 2 and CINEMA 60 DAB Series 2 now support Dirac Live Room Correction as a paid optional upgrade — something the current CINEMA 60 could not do at all.
At the top of the new lineup, the CINEMA 50 Series 2 carries the complete Dirac Live portfolio: Room Correction, Bass Control, and Active Room Treatment, all as optional licences. That mirrors what the outgoing CINEMA 50 already offered, so the real change here is downward reach rather than a new ceiling. Every one of these remains a separate purchase — buying the receiver gets you the hardware and the measurement workflow, not the licence.
The three tiers do genuinely different jobs. Room Correction measures how your room and speakers interact and then corrects timing, phase, frequency response, and tonal balance. Bass Control extends that to the subwoofer handoff, managing integration and low-frequency response so bass stays consistent across more than one seat. Active Room Treatment goes furthest, using the whole speaker array as a coordinated system to actively control room resonances and decay rather than only reshaping the response curve.
Why it matters for tuning: a licence upgrade is not the same thing as a fixed room. Dirac Live is very good at what it does, but it is still working with the speakers you own, in the positions you put them, in a room with whatever modes and reflections it has. The correction filter you end up with is a description of your room's problems as much as a solution to them. Take a sweep at the listening position before you run the calibration, keep it, then run Dirac and sweep again. The difference between those two curves tells you how much of the improvement came from the software — and, more usefully, which dips and peaks it could not fix, because those are almost always the ones that need a speaker moved or a subwoofer repositioned instead.
Dirac framed the expansion as a response to growing demand for room acoustics tools in real-world listening spaces rather than dedicated theatres, which tracks with where these receivers land. The CINEMA 60 Series 2 models are aimed at larger living rooms, while the CINEMA 50 Series 2 is the entry point to Marantz's full room-optimisation stack. Owners of compatible devices purchase and activate the applicable licences directly through Dirac.
