Apply DSP before playback?

[pkane2001]

I bought a very inexpensive, new in the box Pono music player recently. Made a balanced star-quad cable for my HD650s and found that it is a very nice player, but the combo of HD650 and Pono seems to lack a bit in bass and midrange, resulting in an overall too-bright a presentation.

 

I'm already using HQPlayer convolver on the PC to apply EQ and cross-feed, so I came up with the "brilliant" idea of applying DSP impulse response files to music before transferring it over to Pono, hoping to hear a much more balanced output through the headphones.

 

My question is, what's the best way to do this? I have Sox and used it to convolve files before. I assume just convolving the music file with the EQ impulse response file will be sufficient to get a better frequency response, this seems simple enough. The more complex question is how do I do this with the four impulse response files used for cross-feed by HQPlayer? My current setup looks like this in PC HQP:

 

 

Am I correct that to apply the same processing manually, I would have to convolve the left and right channel music files with L-L.wav and R-L.wav (respectively) and then mix the resulting two files at 50% each to get left channel output? And then do the same with the right channel: convolve L-R.wav and R-R.wav with left/right channel audio, then mix at 50% to get the right channel output file?

 

I'm going to test this, but was curious if anyone can confirm or deny that this is the correct process. Thanks for any help or insight, and happy holidays!

 

[pkane2001]

On 12/23/2017 at 11:10 AM, pkane2001 said:

I bought a very inexpensive, new in the box Pono music player recently. Made a balanced star-quad cable for my HD650s and found that it is a very nice player, but the combo of HD650 and Pono seems to lack a bit in bass and midrange, resulting in an overall too-bright a presentation.

 

I'm already using HQPlayer convolver on the PC to apply EQ and cross-feed, so I came up with the "brilliant" idea of applying DSP impulse response files to music before transferring it over to Pono, hoping to hear a much more balanced output through the headphones.

 

My question is, what's the best way to do this? I have Sox and used it to convolve files before. I assume just convolving the music file with the EQ impulse response file will be sufficient to get a better frequency response, this seems simple enough. The more complex question is how do I do this with the four impulse response files used for cross-feed by HQPlayer? My current setup looks like this in PC HQP:

 

 

Am I correct that to apply the same processing manually, I would have to convolve the left and right channel music files with L-L.wav and R-L.wav (respectively) and then mix the resulting two files at 50% each to get left channel output? And then do the same with the right channel: convolve L-R.wav and R-R.wav with left/right channel audio, then mix at 50% to get the right channel output file?

 

I'm going to test this, but was curious if anyone can confirm or deny that this is the correct process. Thanks for any help or insight, and happy holidays!

 

Nobody can comment? Maybe I'll try in the HQPlayer thread, next.

[Miska]

Yes, your matrix setup looks correct... I have similar setup myself...

[pkane2001]

59 minutes ago, Miska said:

Yes, your matrix setup looks correct... I have similar setup myself...

 

Thank you, Jussi. I'm trying to apply the same processing while off-line, so I can improve the sound from Pono player. I'll start with just the EQ settings, and will apply crossfeed after I get that to work well.