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Colinear Acoustics - new 8 channel DSP preamplifier
- Thread starter J_S
- Start date
What i found out (not me but want to bring to attention): Output seems inverted (impulse Response is negative and other way around then on other devices).
In Addition sometimes Changes are not commited to the device when pressing apply (even the * marking on the profile that indicates a not comitted Change stays the same). Only exporting and importing the settings will help, otherwise they are lost on reconnect.
On the rightmost PEQ the tooltips popping up will always obstruct your view of the value setting after clicking into the field to input something (move your mouse away helps but still annoying). And last but not least the Arrow up/down Value Change in the Q Value of a PEQ is too granular (changes a Q of 1.000 to 1.001 -> more sense to change to 1.100).
When Switching Profiles the display of the profile you would switch to onscreen is too tiny. I cant read it safely from more then a meter away. Thats a pity as switching is so smooth and much faster then on a minidsp flex.
Just for safety reasons i find it very appealing that you can commit changes to profiles not in use and it is almost impossible to accidentally change Profile or change something on a running system just by pressing somewhere (as you always have to commit).
In Addition sometimes Changes are not commited to the device when pressing apply (even the * marking on the profile that indicates a not comitted Change stays the same). Only exporting and importing the settings will help, otherwise they are lost on reconnect.
On the rightmost PEQ the tooltips popping up will always obstruct your view of the value setting after clicking into the field to input something (move your mouse away helps but still annoying). And last but not least the Arrow up/down Value Change in the Q Value of a PEQ is too granular (changes a Q of 1.000 to 1.001 -> more sense to change to 1.100).
When Switching Profiles the display of the profile you would switch to onscreen is too tiny. I cant read it safely from more then a meter away. Thats a pity as switching is so smooth and much faster then on a minidsp flex.
Just for safety reasons i find it very appealing that you can commit changes to profiles not in use and it is almost impossible to accidentally change Profile or change something on a running system just by pressing somewhere (as you always have to commit).
Tldr: colinear has (remote controlled) volume control after the dsp stage so you can't simply apply boost without consequences as you can with minidsp that would reduce the input on volume control and therefore have that much headroom. If you boost on colinear you have to lower the corresponding (or overall) input sensitivity by that amount.
Suspected, not fully confirmed:
Another one very big difference from colinear to minidsp seems to be the handling of volume control. Minidsp will scale down the input signal and Colinear will scale the output signal. That means you have to watch out when boosting a signal. I ran into that on my active speaker where the Woofer has a 5db boost at 40hz and sometimes the bass sounded like the speaker had a whistling leak on louder volumes. However pc sweeps (at not full scale
) were always clean and I could hear nothing when wandering around the speaker. Only when using a gliding sinewave generator at almost full scale I noticed severe distortion at 40hz (and at not very high absolute volume). Reducing the generator Volume in 0,1db steps reduced the distortion and made it go away in one single step. I then checked my gain structure and reduced input on colinear dsp to -5db and now I could increase the remote controlled volume setting on the dsp up until -3db (from - 25 before) for the clipping to reappear.
Thats not that big of a deal but something I forgot to take care of as minidsp flex would reduce the input signal on volume control and therefore not digital clip even if you boost a lot just until you run into the physical output limits of the unit.
Suspected, not fully confirmed:
Another one very big difference from colinear to minidsp seems to be the handling of volume control. Minidsp will scale down the input signal and Colinear will scale the output signal. That means you have to watch out when boosting a signal. I ran into that on my active speaker where the Woofer has a 5db boost at 40hz and sometimes the bass sounded like the speaker had a whistling leak on louder volumes. However pc sweeps (at not full scale
) were always clean and I could hear nothing when wandering around the speaker. Only when using a gliding sinewave generator at almost full scale I noticed severe distortion at 40hz (and at not very high absolute volume). Reducing the generator Volume in 0,1db steps reduced the distortion and made it go away in one single step. I then checked my gain structure and reduced input on colinear dsp to -5db and now I could increase the remote controlled volume setting on the dsp up until -3db (from - 25 before) for the clipping to reappear.Thats not that big of a deal but something I forgot to take care of as minidsp flex would reduce the input signal on volume control and therefore not digital clip even if you boost a lot just until you run into the physical output limits of the unit.
Tldr: colinear has (remote controlled) volume control after the dsp stage so you can't simply apply boost without consequences as you can with minidsp that would reduce the input on volume control and therefore have that much headroom. If you boost on colinear you have to lower the corresponding (or overall) input sensitivity by that amount.
Suspected, not fully confirmed:
Another one very big difference from colinear to minidsp seems to be the handling of volume control. Minidsp will scale down the input signal and Colinear will scale the output signal. That means you have to watch out when boosting a signal. I ran into that on my active speaker where the Woofer has a 5db boost at 40hz and sometimes the bass sounded like the speaker had a whistling leak on louder volumes. However pc sweeps (at not full scale
Thats not that big of a deal but something I forgot to take care of as minidsp flex would reduce the input signal on volume control and therefore not digital clip even if you boost a lot just until you run into the physical output limits of the unit.
Ahh, I noticed something similar, sounded like my purifi woofer bottomed out on some crazy bass tracks while I was NOT pushing full output (at least I think so). I just reduced the input volume setting to take care of it like you do, compensating with the max EQ amount. Actually from a DSP headroom point of view, this approach should be superior as the DSP will always get the full range input signal to process, the more bits it gets at the input of all the DSP calculations, the better it should be, the volume control at the output sounds like the most technically correct solution to me. The software could give a warning to say “hey, you are boosting your EQ with xdB, you may want to reduce your input volume with xdB to prevent digital clipping” I prefer it this way as I feel it is the more correct solution from an engineering point of view.
From what I understand reading this DSP-8C handles this similarly to WAF Najda (of DIYaudio fame).Tldr: colinear has (remote controlled) volume control after the dsp stage so you can't simply apply boost without consequences as you can with minidsp that would reduce the input on volume control and therefore have that much headroom. If you boost on colinear you have to lower the corresponding (or overall) input sensitivity by that amount.
Suspected, not fully confirmed:
Another one very big difference from colinear to minidsp seems to be the handling of volume control. Minidsp will scale down the input signal and Colinear will scale the output signal. That means you have to watch out when boosting a signal. I ran into that on my active speaker where the Woofer has a 5db boost at 40hz and sometimes the bass sounded like the speaker had a whistling leak on louder volumes. However pc sweeps (at not full scale
Thats not that big of a deal but something I forgot to take care of as minidsp flex would reduce the input signal on volume control and therefore not digital clip even if you boost a lot just until you run into the physical output limits of the unit.
You have to watch input gain and boosts even out or clipping results.
Najda lights up a warning LED to tell you / also in the live running PC SW, and it's alerting enough to warn you.
I'll find out more about DSP-8C soon enough as I'm ordering one.
