Special Sauce
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- Apr 30, 2020
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Hello audio fanatics , Im trying to get surround sound to work on my headphones and I need some help.
The Asus Xonar DG features a Cirrus Logic CS4245 (Audio Codec), a CS4361 (DAC) and a C-Media Oxygen HD CMI8786 processor i.a..
It's just an old entry level soundcard, still sold today, atrocious driver support, community drivers somewhat allievated that, but didn't want to repeat that mistake when it died and I have a USB DAC instead right now.
With that soundcard I picked the headphone mode in the driver, ticked the Dolby Headphone box and selected 8 channels to work with...
The headphone mode enabled some forced equalization and opened up amplifier options; Dolby Headphone enabled the actual surround emulation, further changing signal frequencies and adding reverb and delays and what not individually for the channels; the channel option determined the amount of channels, set the device to said amount of channels in the Windows sound options as well, and more importantly allowed me to go beyond stereo inputs I could then actually make use of, it also upsampled stereo signals to a 7.1 Setup, which I actually found quite enjoyable - sure, every recording has a specific playback device and mind [as long it is loudspeakers it's good, said my neighbor watching TV with a mask on], but sky is the limit and the more channels available the better I generally suppose.
I realized there were not just better DACs and AMPs, but better virtualizations DSPs around as well, even ones heavily integrated in Win10 such as Windows Sonic which I think I actually prefer over the Dolby Headphone and not just cause it's easily available.
Problem:
With my new DAC that doesn't need or even have a specific driver, Windows won't let me go beyond a 2 speaker set up with my headphones… First I suspected, or hoped, it was just like that not to irritate its users and that maybe it just showed how many channels were presently used, but actually it is just left and right channel, or front left and right with Windows Sonic... Now, nothing gets upsampled beyond stereo format, and multi channel formats higher than stereo won't get reocognized or at least just played back on virtual front left and front right at best. Some games will in fact just render Stereo now and offer nothing else.
Question:
How do I create more channels?
I am missing proper surround sound and I've stumbled upon a free program called "Equalizer APO". I haven't tried it yet, but it looked like it had a lot to offer and I felt like I was going in the right direction with that, cause after all it's just DSP that I need…
So, does anyone know if that's the proper way to do it or knows more elegant solutions to my problem, like from within core Windows?
I know this is kind of a nooby problem, but I feel like a lot of people are facing it too and to me seems to be awkwardly complicated to set headphones up. Thanks!
The Asus Xonar DG features a Cirrus Logic CS4245 (Audio Codec), a CS4361 (DAC) and a C-Media Oxygen HD CMI8786 processor i.a..
It's just an old entry level soundcard, still sold today, atrocious driver support, community drivers somewhat allievated that, but didn't want to repeat that mistake when it died and I have a USB DAC instead right now.
With that soundcard I picked the headphone mode in the driver, ticked the Dolby Headphone box and selected 8 channels to work with...
The headphone mode enabled some forced equalization and opened up amplifier options; Dolby Headphone enabled the actual surround emulation, further changing signal frequencies and adding reverb and delays and what not individually for the channels; the channel option determined the amount of channels, set the device to said amount of channels in the Windows sound options as well, and more importantly allowed me to go beyond stereo inputs I could then actually make use of, it also upsampled stereo signals to a 7.1 Setup, which I actually found quite enjoyable - sure, every recording has a specific playback device and mind [as long it is loudspeakers it's good, said my neighbor watching TV with a mask on], but sky is the limit and the more channels available the better I generally suppose.
I realized there were not just better DACs and AMPs, but better virtualizations DSPs around as well, even ones heavily integrated in Win10 such as Windows Sonic which I think I actually prefer over the Dolby Headphone and not just cause it's easily available.
Problem:
With my new DAC that doesn't need or even have a specific driver, Windows won't let me go beyond a 2 speaker set up with my headphones… First I suspected, or hoped, it was just like that not to irritate its users and that maybe it just showed how many channels were presently used, but actually it is just left and right channel, or front left and right with Windows Sonic... Now, nothing gets upsampled beyond stereo format, and multi channel formats higher than stereo won't get reocognized or at least just played back on virtual front left and front right at best. Some games will in fact just render Stereo now and offer nothing else.
Question:
How do I create more channels?
I am missing proper surround sound and I've stumbled upon a free program called "Equalizer APO". I haven't tried it yet, but it looked like it had a lot to offer and I felt like I was going in the right direction with that, cause after all it's just DSP that I need…
So, does anyone know if that's the proper way to do it or knows more elegant solutions to my problem, like from within core Windows?
I know this is kind of a nooby problem, but I feel like a lot of people are facing it too and to me seems to be awkwardly complicated to set headphones up. Thanks!