Does anyone produce a USB to USB DSP that I can put in between a streamer and DAC?

[shion_ca]

Do any of these DSP's allow you to alter sound based on harmonic distortion? Like adding to the second and fourth harmonics of a frequency being input?

 

[JustJones]

I think you must want a distortion plug-in to run your music through. You'll need to re examine your reluctance to using a computer.

Or sacrifice a chicken to voodoo to remove the bad juju of the odd harmonics.

 

[Sokel]

I think roon does.

Nope.
No way to mess with DSD,it has to be converted.

 

[shion_ca]

I think you must want a distortion plug-in to run your music through. You'll need to re examine your reluctance to using a computer.

Or sacrifice a chicken to voodoo to remove the bad juju of the odd harmonics.

Yes I'm not sure what does what I want... but yeah I would like to be able to configure distortion to have fun and see if I can make a more "tube" like sound. It'd be nice to drop in to switch from a more clean and analytical sound to a tube emulator for some more relaxed late night listening with a bumped mid range on top of it.

Maybe my ambition is silly.

I'd thought maybe some of these DSP boxes had modes for enhancing harmonics since I figured it might be a commonly played with thing in audio.

 

[staticV3]

Yes I'm not sure what does what I want... but yeah I would like to be able to configure distortion to have fun and see if I can make a more "tube" like sound. It'd be nice to drop in to switch from a more clean and analytical sound to a tube emulator for some more relaxed late night listening with a bumped mid range on top of it.

Maybe my ambition is silly.

I'd thought maybe some of these DSP boxes had modes for enhancing harmonics since I figured it might be a commonly played with thing in audio.

FWIW, the latest firmware update for the DMP-A6 adds full Parametric EQ.
It won't add harmonic distortion, but will certainly take care of boosting the midrange.

Edit:
Source: https://twitter.com/GoldenSoundHiFi/status/1746938745876594726

 

[somebodyelse]

Do any of these DSP's allow you to alter sound based on harmonic distortion? Like adding to the second and fourth harmonics of a frequency being input?

https://www.audiosciencereview.com/...ing-beta-test-of-pkharmonic-vst-plugin.19063/
Not sure if there's an ARM version to run on a Pi or other ARM board with both host and gadget mode USB ports. Not sure if there's an x86 board with a gadget mode port.

 

[MCH]

Do any of these DSP's allow you to alter sound based on harmonic distortion? Like adding to the second and fourth harmonics of a frequency being input?

Some DAC chips can do that and I believe some recent dacs (topping, smsl, I don't remember which, but you can Google it) make this feature available, don't need a second box for that. I personally don't notice the difference.

 

[SKBubba]

Nope.
No way to mess with DSD,it has to be converted.

Yes, sorry, I was thinking mqa.

 

[somebodyelse]

Some DAC chips can do that and I believe some recent dacs (topping, smsl, I don't remember which, but you can Google it) make this feature available, don't need a second box for that. I personally don't notice the difference.

ES9038Q2M has compensation for 2nd and 3rd harmonic - Khadas used to have the datasheet in their documentation for the Tone Board, but it's not there any more. Some other models probably do too. I think you can set it with Ian Canada's ESS Controller board.

 

[voodooless]

Well because I believe in Voodoo.

Don’t!

 

[MCH]

ES9038Q2M has compensation for 2nd and 3rd harmonic - Khadas used to have the datasheet in their documentation for the Tone Board, but it's not there any more. Some other models probably do too. I think you can set it with Ian Canada's ESS Controller board.

This. But I refer as well to the more user friendly "modes" I believe they call "tube mode" sort of thing for instance in the Topping D90LE:

Topping D90LE - "Valve" and "Transistor" effects measurements

Hi I've performed a few quick measurements with the Topping D90LE DAC 5V at Max level (USB in, 48kHz, Right Channel) (ADC: E1DA ADC 4.5V Mono, measured with Virtins Multi Instrument 3.9.6) "Standard" mode In "Valve" mode We see a big 2nd harmonic peak (0.32%), with a more limited 3rd...

www.audiosciencereview.com

It seems to me they just change the compensation parameters of the DAC. I experimented -randomly- with them and got similar results:

https://audiosciencereview.com/foru...el-dac-easy-to-diy-in-2023.46788/post-1728334

 

[voodooless]

Deliberately adding harmonics is not so easy. It requires upsampling the audio to a much higher rate, adding the harmonics, and then downsampling it again to the base rate. Usually, this is done on software only, but I'm sure there will be dedicated DSP boxes that can also do this.

What ESS does is just cheating with the DAC compensation features to let more distortion though than it normally would. It's fairly limited in usefulness as an effect dial, I would say because you'll need a lot of distortion to make it audible.

 

[phofman]

ESS does the H2+H3 tweaking by running the samples through a 3rd-order polynomial. It's a mathematically correct method - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chebyshev_polynomials.

The added harmonic depends on signal level - chebyshev polynomials work level-precisely only on sines of amplitude 1 (i.e. only single frequency can be present) https://github.com/pavhofman/nonlinear-compensation/blob/master/octave/run_distortion.m#L10 . Therefore it's not possible to add a precise level of distortion to a general musical signal https://www.diyaudio.com/community/...r-other-distortion.394680/page-2#post-7248338 and following posts.

Static distortions (i.e. those created by polynomial fransfer function) can be added/compensated in a general musical signal. Their phase shift is multiple of pi/2 (because sin(x)^2 -> cos(2x), sin(x)^3 -> -sin(3x), ...). I saw some paper on compensation of dynamic distortions using some non-linear filters.

Compensating static distortions does work, of course it keeps the remaining (dynamic) phase shift of the distortions unaffected https://www.diyaudio.com/community/...ion-for-measurement-setup.328871/post-6527152 , https://www.diyaudio.com/community/...ion-for-measurement-setup.328871/post-6532409 , https://www.diyaudio.com/community/...ion-for-measurement-setup.328871/post-6536105

Dynamic distortions at arbitrary phase shift and level can be easily added to any artificially-generated single/multiple sine signal, e.g. like REW does, simply by generating the required harmonic sines and adding them to the fundamental.