At equal output from each channel, the sound is dead center exactly like mono. The louder the right channel, the farther the apparent sound source travels towards it. To place a recorded signal between the left ear and stage center, some right-channel signal is required to move the sound's apparent origin out of the left ear towards the right. After running through my resident Yamamoto and Woo valve machines, I noticed how their superior tone density and portrayal of connective inter-note tissue made some of the StageDAC's between-the-ears contributions particularly in the blend/fill mode less apparent. And just as with real flowers, there's a season for it. So play some music using mpd with one of the equalizer outputs (or mplayer-ao alsa:device=equal ) if you’re using pcm.Act III: Headphones in the big rig. This is easily done in a terminal using alsamixer, which is already installed as part of ALSA. # alsa force-reload & /etc/init.d/mpd restart Restart alsa and mpd so the changes can take effect: This allows me to toggle mpd output between the following states: I run mpd under my own user name and my ~/.mpdconf contains the following audio outputs: If you set the eq systemwide then you can remove the third output device from the following mpdconf example. If you want every sound from all applications passed through the eq then change The mixer in this example is plug:dmix which can accept and mix multiple audio sources and is enabled automatically in any modern ALSA system. There are two ways to access the equalizer: one passes the equalized output directly to dmix, and the other passes it to the crossfeed device, after which the crossfeed passes its output to the dmix mixer device. This has created several devices: an equalizer, a means to control the equalizer’s settings in real time, and a crossfeed based on Jan Meier’s famous crossfeed hardware (the dmix device already exists and is defined in /usr/share/alsa/pcm/nf – there is no need to touch it). #eq plug passes output to dmix – no crossfeed The integrated intel card is still available if I want to use it.
#Meier crossfeed driver#
So now the USB device driver always loads first on boot and the USB device is always the default. Options snd slots=snd-usb-audio,snd-hda-intel In /etc/modprobe.d/nf I created the lines: For example I have an integrated hda-intel card and a USB card and I want the USB card to be the default sound device. If you have multiple sound cards and want to set one as default this can be done by editing /etc/modprobe.d/nf. The following ~/.asoundrc assumes use of the default soundcard with dmix as the default mixer because on 99% of systems this is how ALSA is automatically set up. Unpack alsaequal-0.6.tar.bz2 and after cd into alsaequal:
#Meier crossfeed install#
# apt-get install build-essential caps libasound2-dev libasound2-plugins bs2b-ladspa swh-plugins Install mbeq, bs2b, and anything necessary to build alsaequal: The best real time controller for the equalizer is alsaequal, which isn’t in Debian Squeeze but is very easy to build (it’s available in Debian Testing/Wheezy). A very nice crossfeed DSP, bs2b-ladspa, is available. The Debian package swh-plugins contains a good LADSPA equalizer plugin, mbeq. To have the option to use the above with all apps (systemwide) and otherwise to be able to choose or toggle the eq and crossfeed on/off when using mpd or mplayer.ĪLSA uses plugins via an API called LADSPA. To have high quality crossfeed to enhance playback with headphones To have a real time, audio equalizer (optionally systemwide if preferred) This is for ALSA, and is not suitable for systems using pulseaudio.