MrHaelscheir
100+ Head-Fier
It would indeed be nice for a quicker solution to come out, but measuring my HRTF and EQing to free-field has so far been the best thing I have ever done in my audio journey.
Anyone into crossfeed?
FWIW, I loved using the lowest crossfeed settings with the Mojo 2 on IEMs. It’s implemented really well.
jamesjames
500+ Head-Fier
I'm pleased to see some more interest in this subject - even if it doesn't always reflect my views. I wouldn't suggest there can't be better solutions for headphone listening now or in the future (or loudspeaker listening for that matter). But, as I've outlined above, I find crossfeed almost always improves the experience of headphone listening in relation to classical music and doesn't require any particular technical expertise (or even interest). Worth a try I would suggest if it sounds interesting.My personal view is that crossfeed is a nice thing to have to 'fix' hard-panned tracks that were clearly mixed solely for speakers so that they don't sound jarring on headphones, but besides that it's usually not an actual benefit for most music, especially now that much of modern music is being mixed with headphones as more of a consideration. I find that it often forces stuff in front of you even if it shouldn't be, and tends to 'smear' centered content in many implementations
Obviously when it comes to spatial enhancement, the endgame is something either such as an atmos like setup with many speakers, though that's usually expensive and difficult to set up and you've got the considerations of room acoustics.
OR
Something that properly takes HRTF and localization cues into account, similar to how a lot of current VR audio solutions work. Though this requires head tracking.
There are some things you can do though with regular stereo tracks that provide a much better experience than crossfeed. I'm actually working on a product right now which I'm very excited to get in people's hands that has what I think is a much better 'spatial enhancement' than anything I've tried on gear previously (though ofc I'm biased there). Needs more compute power than what you can do in a typical DAC though.
Personally I found some of what companies like Valve have done to be really interesting, Valve open-sourced their steam-audio solution and there's some pretty fascinating stuff in there.
Some that is specifically related to games, such as physics-based sound propagation within the virtual environment, but some cool stuff with HRTF & Ambisonics that wouldn't be specific to a game necessarily. As well as there being some cool things you can do by calculating/extrapolating direction and/or location from a stereo track and modifying with approaches such as this....
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Classical music is a genre that I would agree often works with crossfeed better than others. A lot of it really just depends on how the particular track was recorded/mixed.
I think the issue for me with crossfeed is twofold:
- It often pushes things out in front of you too much without widening the stage, ending up in a sound that seems like its 'trying' to sound like speakers but distractingly different from speakers for me.
- With music that has lots of directly centred content, this can become 'smeared' for lack of a better term, sounding as though it's a bit stretched out left to right now rather than being precisely in the centre. Certain implementations do this more or less, as different crossfeed implementations will have different approaches to phase/timing offset and frequency vs crossfeed level, but it's still a common complaint.
I'm a dedicated user of cross-feed, and generally agree with the posts of @jamesjames.
I posted my thoughts on DAVE DAC/amp's CF here. To my ears, a good CF provides benefits to almost all recordings, not just orchestral or early stereo recordings.
Once I "got" the benefits of a good CF, it's now hard to do without - despite some of the downsides - a case of pros outweighing the cons. It is not important whether CF sounds like loudspeakers or a live event - the key objective is that it provides a more coherant sound stage on its owm merits.
But YMMV depending on circumstance. E.g. DAVE can produce a particularly large sound stage with individual images clearly separated. Here DAVE's CF is particularly useful, especially with headphones with a wide sound stage (e.g. Hifiman's HEK series). But the same headphones have a smaller sound stage, with smeared individual images, when driven by my (much cheaper) transportable iFi iDSD. So in this circumstance, I don't feel the need to add any CF. And I don't get on with iFi's take on CF - it produces a sort of pseudo-surround-sound giving a larger, but more diffuse, sound stage.
Anothe example: Roon's DSP CF is good functionally (I particularly like the Meier preset, which in some respects beats DAVE's CF), but to my ears there is a definite loss of transparency when invoking any Roon DSP - resulting in a slight softening/smoothing of the overall presentation. A case where the cons outweigh the pros.
Which leads me to a question:
My Roon runs on a Grimm MU1 server, which uses a variant of linux o/s.
As Roon's own CF is unacceptable to my ears, can anyone recommend a convolution plug-in that would work with Roon in this circumstance?
I'm open to different forms of sound stage enhancements - it doesn't have to be the traditional CF process. But I'm not changing my server.
I posted my thoughts on DAVE DAC/amp's CF here. To my ears, a good CF provides benefits to almost all recordings, not just orchestral or early stereo recordings.
Once I "got" the benefits of a good CF, it's now hard to do without - despite some of the downsides - a case of pros outweighing the cons. It is not important whether CF sounds like loudspeakers or a live event - the key objective is that it provides a more coherant sound stage on its owm merits.
But YMMV depending on circumstance. E.g. DAVE can produce a particularly large sound stage with individual images clearly separated. Here DAVE's CF is particularly useful, especially with headphones with a wide sound stage (e.g. Hifiman's HEK series). But the same headphones have a smaller sound stage, with smeared individual images, when driven by my (much cheaper) transportable iFi iDSD. So in this circumstance, I don't feel the need to add any CF. And I don't get on with iFi's take on CF - it produces a sort of pseudo-surround-sound giving a larger, but more diffuse, sound stage.
Anothe example: Roon's DSP CF is good functionally (I particularly like the Meier preset, which in some respects beats DAVE's CF), but to my ears there is a definite loss of transparency when invoking any Roon DSP - resulting in a slight softening/smoothing of the overall presentation. A case where the cons outweigh the pros.
Which leads me to a question:
My Roon runs on a Grimm MU1 server, which uses a variant of linux o/s.
As Roon's own CF is unacceptable to my ears, can anyone recommend a convolution plug-in that would work with Roon in this circumstance?
I'm open to different forms of sound stage enhancements - it doesn't have to be the traditional CF process. But I'm not changing my server.
jamesjames
500+ Head-Fier
FWIW I agree with @TheAttorney re the iFi components and Roon DSP - particularly Roon. I find DSP 'spatial' implementations generally reduce transparency - although the effect can be quite striking. I haven't used the dCS system - and would be interested to hear from others who have. I've not found the Goodhertz plug-ins to be as satisfying as conventional Moon analogue crossfeed - but I know others find them excellent.
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dolgen
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I've always been against altering the sound with "gimmicky" applications, but I tried the Phonitor crossfeed application and am now hooked. I also have a Rebel headphone amp, which I love and has a very different sound from the Phonitor, but I really miss the crossfeed when listening to the Rebel.
Are there any DAC's I could use with the Rebel that would add crossfeed to the sound? I know the Mojo 2 has crossfeed, but I don't know that it works when using the Mojo as a DAC only into another amp.
Are there any DAC's I could use with the Rebel that would add crossfeed to the sound? I know the Mojo 2 has crossfeed, but I don't know that it works when using the Mojo as a DAC only into another amp.
jamesjames
500+ Head-Fier
I generally use crossfeed, and also find the Phonitor to be excellent. Together with the Moon 430HA, I think these crossfeed implementations are the most satisfying out there (I prefer the Moon slightly). They're both analogue, of course. I've tried many digital approaches but haven't so far found any to rival the analogue implementations I've heard. Burson and iFi amps include crossfeed circuits, with a different character - less to my taste - but with a strong following I gather. I've used Chord DACs and find the crossfeed aspect less satisfying. I've not heard the dCS digital implementation, which has received great reviews. Of course, the dCS cost is stratospheric. One consideration for me is a preference for minimal digital processing of recordings - which I find an issue not just with crossfeed but eq also.
Argha
New Head-Fier
What are the best Softwares that I can use for cross-feed. Till now, I was using the Peace APO
MrHaelscheir
100+ Head-Fier
foobar2000 with the foo_record (used with VB-Cable or Voicemeeter to route streamed PC audio into foobar2000 if you don't have local audio files to play) and bs2b plugins was the first implementation to hook me into crossfeed before I explored more effective personalized HRTF based approaches (see https://www.head-fi.org/threads/rec...-virtualization.890719/page-121#post-18027627 (post #1,812)). Traditional crossfeed will help bring the image forward, but if you have the ability to acquire in-ear microphones and measure your own HRTF, proper binaural rendering offers substantial improvements in forward imaging and coherence and will much more accurately simulate the experience of studio monitors in an anechoic chamber (not like I've actually heard such, but I'd say it's like my Genelecs minus the room reflections at least when using SPARTA AmbiRoomSim with room reflections disabled and the CroPaC plug-in).
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I don't know if Mojo's CF works with an external amp (my DAVE does, but only by design oversight), but Chord's CF implementations in general are good.
Other DAC makers that include CF: Meier (who are CF champions), Weiss (also CF champions), and most interestingly the new Ferrum Wandla Goldensound edition because it has a different (more expansive) take on the classic CF that I haven't tried but would like to.
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Gorktastick
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I’m not sure if they’ve been mentioned here yet, but I think some of the software options have gotten quite good, recently. I find that dSoniQ Realphones 2.0, and APL Virtuoso, to be the best of the bunch.
Will either of these work with Roon? Which supports convolution filters, but not plug-in filters as far as I know.
The app websites don't make this integration aspect very clear.
Gorktastick
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As far as I can tell, it can be done - as long as you are running Roon on a Mac or PC (at least with APL Virtuoso, which I think is actually the better of the two programs I mentioned). If you scroll down on this page I'm linking to, someone posted how they do it, with some very helpful screenshots. And, as always with software - try the free demos first. And if you do try this, please share your impressions here!
https://community.roonlabs.com/t/en...oacoustics-and-binaural-surround-sound/250951
Thank you for that. I listened to some of the Vitruoso sample tracks, and they were very interesting - more towards the "expansive" style, where the overall width increases (compared to traditional CF decreasing the width). But depth-wise, the sound stayed within the line running between my ears. My preference is to bring the sound stage forward in front of me. Also, listening to the classical pieces, I felt that the more expansive presentation came at the cost of image focus, with a slightly out-of-phase feeling.
This was on my laptop directly driving mid-level headphones and it was overall a good experience, so it would be great to try on my main rig. Sadly, my roon server is linux-based, so I won't be able to investigate this any further. Based on what I'd heard, this gave some nice benefits over my DAVE's CF, but also some downsides, which is why it's so important to hear each CF solution yourself - you simply cannot rely on another person's opinion on this topic. Based on what I've read, I'd expect @GoldenSound to much prefer Virtuoso over DAVE's CF (I wonder how the Wandla DAC's implementation compares to Virtuoso?) , but right now, I still prefer DAVE's CF. There's no right or wrong answer here.
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