Hi !
I decided to re-purpose my home office as a listening room and bring a bit of calm in the living room (my wife will be more than happy for it... and me away hahaha)
So, for now, I have a stereo system fed by a FiiO k7 that is also used as a headphone amp for my planar magnetic.
It's a small system (amp is 2*30watts, speakers can handle way more, but with their sensibility, I often don't go more than 30% of the volume potentiometer).
The speakers are 2 way bookshelves speakers from Davis Acoustics, a french manufacturer not far away from where I live and they make great product for the price.
But the home office, as the living room, is a small room, so it's more than enough to me.
I treated acoustically a bit the room with thick acoustic panels, and it improved a lot the listening experience. I plan on going further that road in the future and acquire a measurement mic to guide my acoustic treatment.
But, I want to offload the bass rendering to subs and at the same time expand the range of rendered bass.
I listened to music with a low pass filter on headphones for about a day to decide what are the frequency range I should go for. (that was... "fun")
I also realized a lot of the music I listen to have stereo bass, L and R are different, sometimes by a lot, some instruments that are active in that frequency range are panned totally L or R, so I decided to go with two subs.
That might introduce phase issues, but I'm prepared to try to fix them and if I can't I'll go back to one sub and sell the other one.
I'm decided with which subs I want to go with.
Now, I need to split the stereo signal and eq it to send it to the stereo amp and the two active subs.
I first looked at DSP, but all in all, I think I'll try to stay in the box first.
That would remove an additional AD/DA conversion, a noisy gear (most DSP I considered have a cooling fan...), allow way more flexibility as I can insert any VST in my signal chain and maybe more future proof as upgrading it would just mean changing VST and/or soundcard, but not thightly coupled to gear.
I have a 4 balanced output Akai EIE Pro and I did a proof of concept to validate I can route the signal to reaper, apply the eq then route everything to the sound card output without sample rate or bit depth changes along the way. But, my Akai EIE Pro is now 15 years old, I don't really use it anymore and the output quality is... let's say old.
I also did another routing where only the sub signals are sent to the Akai and the stereo signal is sent to the FiiO.
So I went to my favorite music gear website and browsed what was available with at least 4 outputs.
I'm considering the scarlet 4i4 third gen.
The subs I consider have balanced inputs and I have passive DI that can be used to feed the amp line level rca with balanced signal. (a bit cleaner than just grounding the inverted signal imho, will have to check if it impact the listening experience, but never noticed changes in sound with them when recording instruments)
I looked for reviews on this website, but I can't find info about the third gen.
According to the reviews and measurements of the previous versions, the problems seems to come on higher frequencies, but my subs will only reproduce signal up to 150Hz, so... I'm good ?
And if I ear a noticable difference on the rest of the spectrum for the stereo output, I'll feed the stereo amp with the FiiO.
I can order the gear and sent them back (thomann have a 30day "no question asked" policy), but if I can get it right the first time, would be awesome.
Sorry, that was a longer post than expected.
Do you think the setup I plan to implement will do the trick ?
Are the output DAC of the 4i4 good enough ?
Would you recommend another sound card with the same number of output and asio support ?
Thank you in advance for your answers
I decided to re-purpose my home office as a listening room and bring a bit of calm in the living room (my wife will be more than happy for it... and me away hahaha)
So, for now, I have a stereo system fed by a FiiO k7 that is also used as a headphone amp for my planar magnetic.
It's a small system (amp is 2*30watts, speakers can handle way more, but with their sensibility, I often don't go more than 30% of the volume potentiometer).
The speakers are 2 way bookshelves speakers from Davis Acoustics, a french manufacturer not far away from where I live and they make great product for the price.
But the home office, as the living room, is a small room, so it's more than enough to me.
I treated acoustically a bit the room with thick acoustic panels, and it improved a lot the listening experience. I plan on going further that road in the future and acquire a measurement mic to guide my acoustic treatment.
But, I want to offload the bass rendering to subs and at the same time expand the range of rendered bass.
I listened to music with a low pass filter on headphones for about a day to decide what are the frequency range I should go for. (that was... "fun")
I also realized a lot of the music I listen to have stereo bass, L and R are different, sometimes by a lot, some instruments that are active in that frequency range are panned totally L or R, so I decided to go with two subs.
That might introduce phase issues, but I'm prepared to try to fix them and if I can't I'll go back to one sub and sell the other one.
I'm decided with which subs I want to go with.
Now, I need to split the stereo signal and eq it to send it to the stereo amp and the two active subs.
I first looked at DSP, but all in all, I think I'll try to stay in the box first.
That would remove an additional AD/DA conversion, a noisy gear (most DSP I considered have a cooling fan...), allow way more flexibility as I can insert any VST in my signal chain and maybe more future proof as upgrading it would just mean changing VST and/or soundcard, but not thightly coupled to gear.
I have a 4 balanced output Akai EIE Pro and I did a proof of concept to validate I can route the signal to reaper, apply the eq then route everything to the sound card output without sample rate or bit depth changes along the way. But, my Akai EIE Pro is now 15 years old, I don't really use it anymore and the output quality is... let's say old.
I also did another routing where only the sub signals are sent to the Akai and the stereo signal is sent to the FiiO.
So I went to my favorite music gear website and browsed what was available with at least 4 outputs.
I'm considering the scarlet 4i4 third gen.
The subs I consider have balanced inputs and I have passive DI that can be used to feed the amp line level rca with balanced signal. (a bit cleaner than just grounding the inverted signal imho, will have to check if it impact the listening experience, but never noticed changes in sound with them when recording instruments)
I looked for reviews on this website, but I can't find info about the third gen.
According to the reviews and measurements of the previous versions, the problems seems to come on higher frequencies, but my subs will only reproduce signal up to 150Hz, so... I'm good ?
And if I ear a noticable difference on the rest of the spectrum for the stereo output, I'll feed the stereo amp with the FiiO.
I can order the gear and sent them back (thomann have a 30day "no question asked" policy), but if I can get it right the first time, would be awesome.
Sorry, that was a longer post than expected.
Do you think the setup I plan to implement will do the trick ?
Are the output DAC of the 4i4 good enough ?
Would you recommend another sound card with the same number of output and asio support ?
Thank you in advance for your answers
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