[sound_man]

As a few of your know, I've been on some kind of "personal mission" to get the best possible sound out of these 30 dollars... and here's where I'm at right now.

Since I'm a computer scientist, all you need is an unmodded PortaPro and a decent sound card.

I've wrapped up a small configuration of the foobar2000 player here, which you extract into your C:\ location (otherwise it doesn't find some files). Then, you drag music onto it and listen.

It is necessary to have it use Kernel Streaming to bypass the Mixer, Resampler, and EQ that are built into Windows. KS is enabled by default, and when an error comes up, this is the most likely reason. If so, you press Ctrl+P, go to Playback/Output, and select "KS : <your soundcard's name>" or, alternatively "ASIO : <your soundcard's name>" DON'T select anything starting with "DS : ". Save, restart it, and your're set. If this is the only option that works, you're out of luck - sorry...

Would be nice to see your opinions.

 

[pdelagar]

Maybe this discussion belongs to the computer audio forum, but your experiment is interesting. I also have Portapros.

i tried your configuration and I liked it!.

The configuration that I currently use is the SRC sampler and the noise sharpening DSP with crossfeed. It is a different sound though.

I have one question, How did you make the kernel.wav file for the convolution DSP?. I want to make the same experiment for my Grado SR80.

 

[sound_man]

Quote:

Originally Posted by pdelagar /img/forum/go_quote.gif Maybe this discussion belongs to the computer audio forum, but your experiment is interesting. I also have Portapros. i tried your configuration and I liked it!. The configuration that I currently use is the SRC sampler and the noise sharpening DSP with crossfeed. It is a different sound though. I have one question, How did you make the kernel.wav file for the convolution DSP?. I want to make the same experiment for my Grado SR80.

That's nice to hear.

I'd be curious why there's almost nobody replying to this thread.

This is not in computer audio because you don't necessarily need a computer to play the music (just for testing convenience). You can always convert your sound in foobar and burn it onto a CD.

The kernel was pretty tedious work. I started with one that turns headphones which sound like =165]this into headphones sounding like some average of =549&graphID[]=255&graphID[]=651&graphID[]=477]that. This was my initial guess, from which I hand-tuned it using lots of music that I assumed to be properly mixed... (basically, if a certain flaw was audible in at least 3 different records, I corrected it, and went ahead, keeping a sharp eye on the behavior of the changed portion in the rest of the reference music).

 

[Deftoned]

Hi sound_man!

Is it necessary to use Kernel Streaming with Vista as well? From what I understand of this thread it does not.

Btw. The sound out of my laptops headphone out(I use Vista) is horrible. Noisy and very flat sound that still manages to sound very fatiguing. Is there any setup-changes I could do whitout installing any software?

Thanks!

 

[sound_man]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Deftoned /img/forum/go_quote.gif Hi sound_man! Is it necessary to use Kernel Streaming with Vista as well? From what I understand of this thread it does not. Btw. The sound out of my laptops headphone out(I use Vista) is horrible. Noisy and very flat sound that still manages to sound very fatiguing. Is there any setup-changes I could do whitout installing any software? Thanks!

I think it should be possible to use the ASIO output on Vista/XP, if you have such a sound driver installed. But I haven't tried that yet, especially not on Vista, which I don't use.
BUT if you want to get the music directly into your CD player, do the following: Drag some tracks onto foobar, select them, right-click them, click Convert/Convert To..., pick an encoder, e.g. WAV or FLAC, and press OK. Then burn the files on CD, and you're ready to go (don't forget to turn the EQs off in your CD player, headphone Amp, etc.).

 

[pdelagar]

I've tried a different configuration (using Foobar 2000) that also works very good (a very small change from the one originally suggested by sound_man). Instead of converting the signal to more than two channels and then using Dolby Headphone I used a VST plugin called hdphx, followed by the convolver using the wav file made by soundman and upsampling at 48Khz with SRC. Now my PortaPros have a sound I really enjoy.