OT: Audio Processing

Then there's Metallica's "And Justice For All" which had a snappy kick. and no bass. Cuz they let 26 y/o metalheads make most of the mix engineering decisions

I think I should have found those words somewhere in there. You put it more succinctly and with better detail. But that i s what I was thinking in a way, just poorly expressed.

However, my personal experience is that the thing is going to have to have a hell of alot of range, I would estimate maybe 36 dB, because some of that audio is that bad. Like I said, 20 dB isn't cutting it over here.

But you are probably right on exactly how the thing works. And since it is not as big as a breadbox it is probably all digital. it may even have a quite fast processor if you think about it.

I know Jim was looking for someone with personal experience on these but this is Usenet. The way I see it, he has money, so if he can get a refund after a trial period then go for it.

speakers, and lots of them :-) "

Nice. I mean really, no snark here. But try watching an action movie at 3:0

0 AM.

I have been in jail for a loud stereo. I will have to write that up one day and post it, the whole experience was hilarious. I swear I had a better ti me there than I would have at home ! "you better watch out for that dude, h e is in here for a loud stereo" as if I killed ten armed cops with my bare hands. With all the off topic stuff these days what can it hurt ?

I mean *nonsense*. Cheap headsets often have little or no control on force and often clamp the ears. Your "pay a dollar" is bullshit and you know it. ...but run away, like you always do.

Want loud?

Yup, I'm sure it's all digital, it's just a box with an HDMI/analog input and outputs and a processor in-between. All the processing e.g. multiband compression, equalization, whatever Super Secret Patented signal path they're running is straightforward to run on a fast processor which these days might not cost more than $5-10 in quantity and may have DSP-like instructions built in (single-instruction-multiple-data, some ARM cores have this.)

I have a little Line 6 guitar effects box that does emulations of various vintage tube amps and effects, using "circuit modeling"; I don't know exactly what that entails - not a full SPICE simulation in real-time I'm sure but some kind of simplified mathematical model amenable to implementing as a sequence of digital filters, it does a pretty striking resemblance IMO

"I'm broke, baby"

Or just a cheap DSP. The problem with something like an M7 is separating the DSP functions from the processor functions without using all the cycles with overhead. They tend to be more expensive than a low-end DSP, too, if that's all that's needed.

It's often more of a PITA to return something than it's worth.

...doesn't "AM" stand for "Always Modern"?

Those things are comfortable enough, but not particularly durable, and do nothing to block external sounds. it's the sort of thing they hand out to travelers so they can listen to the entertainment. I was on a train.

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This email has not been checked by half-arsed antivirus software

r working out on the cardio machines at the gym. (-- which admittedly, I wa s immediately skeptical because it sure reeked of being a Millennial hyped item). However, a friend of mine loaned me his and the sound really was am azing, and definitely loud enough (on an iPod nano MP3 player).

bout $200 and they were on sale at the time. That was 3 years ago, and the y're holding up very well.

They're holding up ok so far, but my ears don't like being clamped in them for too long. No wonder old films show people just holding one side up to t heir head. The bare HT connections don't reassure me much though.

and

aying a dollar to get anything that bad. Even at the bottom of the barrel a lot are comfortable.

nothing

rs so

you won't educate the ineducable

NT

Sure, hard to say which they picked and I'm sure they aren't telling, you'd have to rip it open to find out!

When I see projects like this that are crowdsourced and are put together by "semi-pros" (Designed in Hollywood!) I tend to assume they went with the more well-known but expensive option of using an ARM to do DSP on a general-purpose computer vs. a low-end dedicated DSP that's cheaper and can do the same job, basically just because ARM has a a great open-source C/C++ compiler you can use with any free IDE like Eclipse while the toolchains for some manufacturer's bargain-basement DSPs tend to be obtuse and sometimes cost real money.

Makes sense to do the latter if you're making millions of units but for tens of thousands idk. The hardware design was likely outsourced; if you look down the team list

I see famous people, executives, and "engineers" but the engineers all appear to be primarily "audio guys"/sound mix engineers/sound designers a few of whom may be able to write audio processing code but maybe not design all the hardware from scratch.

IMO the development process was they outsourced the hardware design to some company, who built them an ARM-based computer in a box, grabbed some open-source C++ audio processing EQ/multiband compressor plugins and wrote a little toolchain such that someone with limited coding/hardware knowledge could script their order and behavior while running on the box in Python or something, and then let the audio guys go nuts with it playing around in the scripting language until they found a combination of settings that sounded good

The Kickstarter raised ~$700,000 but by the time all the overhead of executives and famous people and audio engineers in line is paid it probably left like 10 grand for the hardware design lol. A box like that is what ten grand of outsource development money will getcha.

Just found this on the site, looks like ON Semi makes a DSP that name-drops Aftermaster:

I didn't realize that it was a whole line of products like headphones etc. that they're shoving their secret-sauce patented algorithm into, if that's the case using a factory-programmed DSP makes more sense

Found this datasheet on the site:

Looks like the gameplan for the hardware is to have this preprogrammed DSP put in lots of different stuff like headphones, rack boxes, etc. to make the sound better using a secret-sauce algorithm, the ingredients of which they won't tell.

The secret-sauce algorithm can also apparently be run on a general-purpose computer and they will license the software too.

I don't. Writing DSP code is C isn't simple. Gluing GUI blocks together in a DSP app is a piece of cake, though. Even the learning curve is pretty low.

You think it's easy sharing an ARM between realtime DSP code and uC sorts of code?

"Ah, LabView: Spaghetti code that even _looks_ like spaghetti!"

You do have to know signals and systems to get anything good out of it, though.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

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Dr Philip C D Hobbs 
Principal Consultant 
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC 
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 

160 North State Road #203 
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 

hobbs at electrooptical dot net 
http://electrooptical.net

Nope. Not even.

No, I wasn't thinking about LabView, rather something like SigmaStudio or whatever tools other suppliers use.

Writing DSP code in C/C++ isn't really that painful, and it doesn't require an enormous amount of general-purpose compute power to process say 2 channels of CD-quality audio through a digital multiband compressor and EQ nowadays.

A state-variable resonant filter running at 44.1kHz processing 16 bit samples can even be implemented on an 8-bit AVR @ 16 MHz (the variant with a hardware multiplier) no problem, for a single channel it requires around 350 clocks to process one sample.

A RISC processor with SIMD instructions like the Cortex M4 and M7 are not bad approximations of a dedicated DSP