5.1 Headphone experience *Foobar configuration for all stereo music files* - Page 33

I fixed it i had wrong the order channel mixer and dolby . Thanks

Well, after years of playing with countless DSPs trying to find the best results, I ended up with a setup as simple as it can get.

To me the best Foobar2k DSP chain for headphone listening of stereo music is this:

Convert Stereo To 4 Channels;

Dolby Headphone (DH2, Amplification 50%, Dynamic Compression Off).

For some time i've used Dolby Headphone alone, because I never tought artificially adding more channels could do any good, because Dolby Headphone is said to create 5 virtual speakers and 1 subwoofer, carefully arranged on a virtual room with the correct dimensions, characteristics, etc, so in theory, with stereo material it should sound as if the surround speakers were simply silent, and you would get sound only from the front left and front right.

But then, using DH alone on stereo files, especially noisy material and modern over compressed recordings, it sounded very congested and incredibly distorted the more instruments were playing at the same time, producing a really harsh sound, especially the guitars and snare drums, sounding almost electronic. Upmixing stereo to 4 channels, simply by copying the front channels to the back, without changing their sound in any way made the sound incredible fuller and realistic, very acoustically sounding, with each instruments being easily dicerned from another, while mantaining the original characteristics of the music.

Let me say that using those simple settings the sound in no way comes from your front, to me it sounds like I'm on the stage with the band, hearing the return monitors and the concert speakers behind me. Anyway, to me it's the best compromisse between surround headphone listening and changing the original sound as little as possible, I like it. 

if you have a good stereo and amp you don't need surround sound to emulate a perfect stereo image. i can clearly hear things behind me,front,and side and i'm using stereo speakers and headphones. there is no need for surround sound if your headphones and speakers have a nice defined soundstage. i know this first hand cause i had experience with gimmicky 5.1 headsets and none of'em compare to true stereo.

 also if you want true out of your head soundstage with headphones, then try binural(don't if i spelled it correctly) recordings. you'll be amazed and it's much better than doby headphone i think.

Quote:

Originally Posted by RexAeterna 

if you have a good stereo and amp you don't need surround sound to emulate a perfect stereo image. i can clearly hear things behind me,front,and side and i'm using stereo speakers and headphones. there is no need for surround sound if your headphones and speakers have a nice defined soundstage. i know this first hand cause i had experience with gimmicky 5.1 headsets and none of'em compare to true stereo.

 also if you want true out of your head soundstage with headphones, then try binural(don't if i spelled it correctly) recordings. you'll be amazed and it's much better than doby headphone i think.

Look at the thread title please.

Nobody's talking about speakers, except you.

And I think you meant binaural, wich is exaclty what DH try to emulate, a binaural recording from any stereo content.

Off course it can't be perfect, since people have different head shapes and sizes, but it's real close if you ask me.

And if you can listen with headphones to old recordings, like the beatles for instance, with extremelly panned instruments, with guitars only on the right channel, and drums only on the left channel, without DH or any kind of crossfeed... Well, good for you, but that experience doesn't please me at all, I'll pass.

I tried this some time ago. Works really well with headphones that don't have much soundstage on their own. Tried it with HD800 and it completely butchered the soundstage.

I've used this with mixed feelings.  Its good for orchestral recordings where some surround and reverb are good.  But not every recording benefits from this plugin...some are destroyed by it.  What I really like is with foobar's portable install option, I don't have to go back and forth with when I want the settings on....just open a different instance of foobar. 

Well I just find it important to set the "stereoimage width" for Channel mixer and general tab appropriately for every headphone/soundcard/source you're using, 1.0 is too much for me when I'm using kX Audio driver's pseudo surround function so in foobar2000 I have the stereoimage with set to 0.87 and the width is suitably wide. Then I also play around with the volume levels in channel mixer and find for example rear in front and front in rear volume to sound best when set to 0.57 while "center" and "volume" is kept at 1.0 for some reason with my soundcard/driver setup. DH amplification set to 120%.

I think it sounds great for any genre and song I listen to, always brings an improvement although EQ had to be adjusted to balance out what dolby headphone changes, mostly the deep bass, here's my foobar2000 EQ setting to counter the imbalance dolby headphone adds (ie mostly boost to the lowend which I find to mask the fine details in the midrange somewhat and I prefer using soundcard's EQ if needing to EQ):

Can someone help me set this up?

I'm on this step:

I've added all the dlls into the components folder but the DTS decoder doesn't actually appear on my Available DSPs list. I'm new to foorbar so I must've be doing something wrong. Here's a print screen ( can't seem to attach the image for some reason)

http://img222.imageshack.us/img222/2669/dtsh.png

Am I doing something wrong?

You can try this config, it's already configured, only need to extract it somewhere. However I do encourage to play around with "channel mixer" settings, especially "stereoimage width" in the first tab in the configurations for that plugin to set the width accordinly to your preference/equipment. http://cid-87ed83e2c9fd453c.office.live.com/self.aspx/Public/foobar2000/foobar2000.zip

I just wanted to update and say I DO have a backup copy of 0.2.8, so my setup is back to normal!

As I said earlier in this thread, the DTS decoder has become a default component of Foobar in the newer versions, so it does not appear in the DSP because it is already used...

I tweaked the settings a little further and it sounds so amazing for me, every studio recording becomes very natural "live" sounding. No exaggeration, it's just "right", every one step on a slider seems to count and can give  noticable difference, especially if I go above 0.87 on stereo width it starts sounding more unnatural to me, same as touching the dolby headphone amplification slider, seems to be picky and certain step works better than another.

Yes I'm using foobar2000 v1.0.3 so therefore DTS decoder is listed in active DSPs list because when I tried latest version it just didn't sound as great in my ears. If you want to try it out here's a preconfigured foobar2000 with the settings above http://cid-87ed83e2c9fd453c.office.live.com/self.aspx/Public/foobar2000/foobar2000.zip