Hi, this is my first post here, and I've heard this is the place to come to concerning audio, so here it is (sorry if this isn't the right section, seems closest). My case is as follows, I have a PC with an onboard Realtek ALC889A soundcard. My speaker system is a Z-5500, and my problem is this. I want to find some sort of sure solution for making all of my stereo media play over all of my speakers, because I didn't pay for 6 speakers to have only 2 of them used.
There is a lot of software that apparently does this, such as Dolby Digital, DTS Connect, Speaker Fill, what have you, but that is not what I want. I don't want "fake", "extracted" "advanced-mathematical-algorithms-analyzed" surround.
No. What I simply want, is that everything that is stereo clones the 2 channels over all the speakers. Like this:
That's it. Is that so hard to ask for? That way the original stereo information is preserved, there are no fake effects added, it only gets equally spread over all the speakers. The Z-5500 has a similar thing called Stereo X2, but that only uses the fronts and rears, creating a quadraphonic effect, which is still better than nothing for now I guess.
For music, I have found this god-given plugin for Winamp called WinampMatrixMixer. It has a mixing matrix that allows you to specify exactly which input channel is played on which output channel.
So basically, you're still playing a stereo song except that now you have 2 speakers playing the left channel (instead of only one), 2 playing the right, and the center and subwoofer play a mix of the two (0.7071 because that is half the power of one channel).
Unfortunately this only works for Winamp. I have yet to find a software which will allow me to manually clone input channels as I want, and actually work with all audio on the system. There is SRS Audio Sandbox which works on all audio but does the fake processing thing too. I have a cheap 5.1 HT Vivax speaker system which does this sort of mixing automatically - if you connect it to a stereo source and select 5.1 CH, only the front two speakers play, and if you select Stereo, it will clone the stereo over all the channels. So if I can't find a software solution, my question is: what sort of hardware device would I need to have an option like this? I don't know much about audio equipment...receiver? Mixing deck? What would I need? I know it should connect between the PC and Z-5500. Of course if it received actual 5.1 CH audio it would basically output that as it is without any modifications. Is there anything capable of doing what I'm asking and preferably not costing a thousand $ ?
Sorry for this very long winded post, thanks for reading if you did, and thanks in advance for any helpful replies
There is a lot of software that apparently does this, such as Dolby Digital, DTS Connect, Speaker Fill, what have you, but that is not what I want. I don't want "fake", "extracted" "advanced-mathematical-algorithms-analyzed" surround.
No. What I simply want, is that everything that is stereo clones the 2 channels over all the speakers. Like this:
That's it. Is that so hard to ask for? That way the original stereo information is preserved, there are no fake effects added, it only gets equally spread over all the speakers. The Z-5500 has a similar thing called Stereo X2, but that only uses the fronts and rears, creating a quadraphonic effect, which is still better than nothing for now I guess.
For music, I have found this god-given plugin for Winamp called WinampMatrixMixer. It has a mixing matrix that allows you to specify exactly which input channel is played on which output channel.
So basically, you're still playing a stereo song except that now you have 2 speakers playing the left channel (instead of only one), 2 playing the right, and the center and subwoofer play a mix of the two (0.7071 because that is half the power of one channel).
Unfortunately this only works for Winamp. I have yet to find a software which will allow me to manually clone input channels as I want, and actually work with all audio on the system. There is SRS Audio Sandbox which works on all audio but does the fake processing thing too. I have a cheap 5.1 HT Vivax speaker system which does this sort of mixing automatically - if you connect it to a stereo source and select 5.1 CH, only the front two speakers play, and if you select Stereo, it will clone the stereo over all the channels. So if I can't find a software solution, my question is: what sort of hardware device would I need to have an option like this? I don't know much about audio equipment...receiver? Mixing deck? What would I need? I know it should connect between the PC and Z-5500. Of course if it received actual 5.1 CH audio it would basically output that as it is without any modifications. Is there anything capable of doing what I'm asking and preferably not costing a thousand $ ?
Sorry for this very long winded post, thanks for reading if you did, and thanks in advance for any helpful replies
