Hi all.
I've spent a good part of this year building and enjoying a mid-fi audio system + speakers. Inevitably I fell down the rabbit hole of speaker placement, room acoustics, acoustic treatments, EQ, and finally DSP/room correction. It's been fun (though occasionally frustrating) and I've learned a lot about the priorities of these things.
I've recently come to the conclusion that I think EQ and room correction are important to me, and I've been racking my brain trying to figure out how to inject such a thing into my stereo system. I gave up on analog EQ because there just aren't that many options that are both affordable and flexible. DSP seemed to have more potential, but getting it into my system somehow was still a puzzle. It's especially hard because I have a mix of analog and digital inputs - CD player, TV, turntable, tape deck, laptop - and it's tough to find a combination of devices that all of these sources can be routed into, digitized (if necessary), DSPed, and ideally output into a separate DAC.
At some point I started to wonder how I might get all of this audio into and out of my laptop. That seemed to be the ideal - total access to and control of the audio. I'm an amateur musician and had an old Focusrite Scarlett 6i6 laying around, and it had enough inputs to at least try the idea. Later I may need to upgrade to something like the Clarett 4Pre USB to have enough inputs for all my sources. If anyone has alternative suggestions with a good mix of both analog and digital inputs/outputs and which isn't some huge rack-mounted audio interface, I'd be interested.
So I'm routing the audio into my laptop using the 6i6 and listening to it via input monitoring in Logic Pro X with the Channel EQ plugin to proof-of-concept the approach. It seems to work just fine. Of course, now I want to try something like Dirac, but they don't appear to currently have a version of their room correction software that I can run directly on my MacBook Pro. Hopefully that will change soon, at least based on another recent thread I was reading.
Is anyone else running this sort of variety of sources through their laptop/computer for processing? I'd be curious to know how you're doing it. I'll probably post more details of what I'm doing once I get it all settled and working, in case anyone else in the future finds this thread.
I've spent a good part of this year building and enjoying a mid-fi audio system + speakers. Inevitably I fell down the rabbit hole of speaker placement, room acoustics, acoustic treatments, EQ, and finally DSP/room correction. It's been fun (though occasionally frustrating) and I've learned a lot about the priorities of these things.
I've recently come to the conclusion that I think EQ and room correction are important to me, and I've been racking my brain trying to figure out how to inject such a thing into my stereo system. I gave up on analog EQ because there just aren't that many options that are both affordable and flexible. DSP seemed to have more potential, but getting it into my system somehow was still a puzzle. It's especially hard because I have a mix of analog and digital inputs - CD player, TV, turntable, tape deck, laptop - and it's tough to find a combination of devices that all of these sources can be routed into, digitized (if necessary), DSPed, and ideally output into a separate DAC.
At some point I started to wonder how I might get all of this audio into and out of my laptop. That seemed to be the ideal - total access to and control of the audio. I'm an amateur musician and had an old Focusrite Scarlett 6i6 laying around, and it had enough inputs to at least try the idea. Later I may need to upgrade to something like the Clarett 4Pre USB to have enough inputs for all my sources. If anyone has alternative suggestions with a good mix of both analog and digital inputs/outputs and which isn't some huge rack-mounted audio interface, I'd be interested.
So I'm routing the audio into my laptop using the 6i6 and listening to it via input monitoring in Logic Pro X with the Channel EQ plugin to proof-of-concept the approach. It seems to work just fine. Of course, now I want to try something like Dirac, but they don't appear to currently have a version of their room correction software that I can run directly on my MacBook Pro. Hopefully that will change soon, at least based on another recent thread I was reading.
Is anyone else running this sort of variety of sources through their laptop/computer for processing? I'd be curious to know how you're doing it. I'll probably post more details of what I'm doing once I get it all settled and working, in case anyone else in the future finds this thread.
