Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Matt]

I spent the day adding a new Media Center zone to play in my kitchen.

It's been fun other than accidentally drilling through a heat duct while trying to run cable.  A smart person would have stopped pushing on the drill while wondering "why is it so hard to drill through the plaster in this spot?"

Along the way, I think I figured out a nice way to output several stereo zones from any soundcard.

The old approach to this is to either:
1) Find hardware that exposes each analog output as a discrete device -- it's hard to find hardware that does this
2) Use the routing options with Direct Sound output to target particular speakers -- this is an exercise in frustration because drivers don't behave reliably with this approach

Instead, I realized you can just output on all the channels in each zone.  Then, mute the channels you're not using with Parametric Equalizer.

So, two zone output looks like this (it should scale to 4 stereo zone output with a 7.1 card):

1. Configure Windows to think of the device as 4.0
2. Create two zones in Media Center
3. Set both zones to use WASAPI - Event Style (not in exclusive mode, since we need both to use the card at once)
4. Set both zones to output at the system samplerate in DSP Studio > Output Format (probably 48 kHz, but configurable in Windows sound configuration for the device)
5. Set both zones to output at 4.0, using JRSS
6. Use 'Parametric Equalizer 2' to only target the proper lines:
     Zone 1: 'Mute SL,SR'
     Zone 2: 'Move L to SL', 'Move R to SR', 'Mute L,R'
7. Set the volume to 'Internal Volume' for both zones (you probably want to set the system volume to 100% as well)
8. Configure speaker distances and levels with Room Correction for each zone (configure for L/R only, since that's the channel used until the very end when Parametric Equalizer 2 moves channels)

Hopefully this helps someone else.

Time to get back to patching my walls.

[mojave]

I thought your method sounded familiar, but it took me a little while to find out why. One can also combine stereo signals into mono outputs if he is only going to have a single speaker in each zone.

[Matt]

You did it to me again!

I think that means I'm catching up.  I'm only a couple month behind you this time instead of a couple years.

[Matt]

In a coming build it will be possible to select "2 channels (inside 4 channel container)" inside DSP Studio > Output Format > Channels.

This allows you to get the benefit of proper up and down mixing when using a configuration like this.

Other variants like "5.1 channels (inside 7.1 channel container)", etc. are also available.

[Matt]

Media Center now has a Parametric Equalizer filter called 'Order Channels'.

It makes this approach even easier.

Pick "2 channels (inside 4 channel container)" like mentioned above.

Then add an 'Order Channels' to Parametric Equalizer 2 (you want this at the end of the chain) and move Left / Right down for the second zone.

The same approach scales to 4 zones on an 8 channel card, etc.