Dirac Multichannel - Quad Setup vs 5.1 signal

[Aerith Gainsborough]

Fair day, ladies and gentlemen.

I use a Dirac Live Processor setup for Stereo (Voicemeeter Potato <-> Cantabile Light) for quite some time now.
Sounds good, everything works, does what it is supposed to do.

Now on occasion I bust out my two little rear speakers and enjoy some multichannel music and (if I feel like risking pitchforks and torches, even the odd movie).
My system is a Nearfield 4.0 system, no Subwoofer and no Center.

Pic added for hilarity. Yep, that is a music rest on the left.

Before anyone asks:
Available subwoofer placement options suck, according to REW, so I never bothered. Neighbor is probably a happy camper about that one.
A Center channel just doesn't fit into the ~ 5cm gap between my TV and my Desk, so unless I want to put it into my lap, there is no way to make it happen. No biggie here either, since it's a 1 person listening spot and the phantom Center works very well.

The downmix is done by my AVR, which is fed the signal via HDMI.

Anyhow, here is my question to you knowledgeable folks:
Can the Dirac Multichannel plugin made to work with this? Specifically, I am asking about the discrepancy between physical speakers available and speakers represented in the signal.

If I configure Dirac as 5.1, it would probably adjust Front L+R and Surround L+R and leave the Center + LFE unprocessed, which would render it pointless because the bass would go through uncorrected after the AVR downmixes. Or worse, it would get confused to to the LFR downmixing the test signal, trying to adjust for center and front speakers.

If I configure Dirac as 4.0, It would probably discard the Center and LFE information completely.

Would I have to downmix to 4.0 in the DAW / player before sending the signal to Dirac? If so, how would that work? Anybody know any good plugins for that compatible with Cantabile Lite?

I would love to be able to test this w/o having to pay the 123€ but alas, no multichannel upgrade demo. ._.

Thank you for your attention / efforts
Aerith

 

[Kal Rubinson]

Would I have to downmix to 4.0 in the DAW / player before sending the signal to Dirac?

Yes. Dirac equalizes the speaker channels in the room, not the source channels (vs. what?).

 

[Aerith Gainsborough]

Hmm so my gut hat the right intuition. Thank you for confirming it.

I got it to work now, with a rather whacky setup of Voicemeeter -> Element -> Halo Downmix (5.1 -> 4.0) -> Dirac Multichannel -> Voicemeeter -> HDMI out.

Beethoven in Blu Ray sounds good so far. Will be interesting to assess the long term stability.

 

[Kal Rubinson]

I got it to work now, with a rather whacky setup of Voicemeeter -> Element -> Halo Downmix (5.1 -> 4.0) -> Dirac Multichannel -> Voicemeeter -> HDMI out.

I run it all on a PC using JRMC and I can insert Dirac at the end.

Beethoven in Blu Ray sounds good so far.

Beethoven in BluRay?
Better than DSD256 in 5.1?

 

[Aerith Gainsborough]

I run it all on a PC using JRMC and I can insert Dirac at the end.

Beethoven in BluRay?
Better than DSD256 in 5.1?

I hate the JRivers UI navigation with a passion.
I much prefer Foobar. Even though I wish the devs would give it a dark theme that didn't necessitate messing up half my Windows.

It's not all bad though, Halo Downmix gives me a lot of control over the individual channels. I can do fun stuff like raise the center channel to make dialogue easier to follow etc, something that AVR manufacturers always reserve for their premium models.

Honestly? No clue where I got that. I ARRR!'d the "Barenboim symphony 1-9 BD Collection" many years back in my wilder Internet days and have since then discarded the actual BD image and only kept it as multichannel FLAC. So I cannot give more information, sorry.

Still, now that hard and software is set up, the next challenge will be finding more content I like. Most music I listen to does not exist in multichannel formats and upmixing stereo is not my thing. Sounds so weird.
nativeDSD seems like a good place to start.