This on the new Movietone News archive on Youtube.
Also, a recording session at Abbey Road from 1974.
Daphne Oram recording the sound of the future:
And a childhood myth shattered! The Stylophone wasn’t invented by Rolf Harris…
This on the new Movietone News archive on Youtube.
Also, a recording session at Abbey Road from 1974.
Daphne Oram recording the sound of the future:
And a childhood myth shattered! The Stylophone wasn’t invented by Rolf Harris…
[Update: now running on a fanless Bay Trail processor]
After a few evenings of half-hearted attempts to port my Windows code and make the changes needed to run on Linux, I finally got my head around what was needed, and it works! Unfortunately I’m not at the house where the amp and speakers are so I can’t try it ‘in anger’ but at least I can tell that I’m getting what sounds like correctly-filtered Spotify or CD from the three stereo outputs.
On a ten year old Dell GX520 it’s using about 16% of the CPU, and when you add in Spotify at about another 16% plus the snd-aloop driver and all the other stuff going on in an internet-connected PC, it comes to about 40% CPU, which is a bit higher than I had hoped – there’s a tiny amount of fan noise. Maybe there is scope to improve the efficiency of the crossover software: at the moment I am reading and writing 32 bit integers to/from the sound cards (one is a dummy sound card of course) but doing all the processing in floating point which therefore involves converting each sample twice with a potentially expensive operation. Maybe this can be speeded up. And I can always find a faster, cooler PC of course.
[13/07/15] In response to a comment, the point of all this is not just to implement basic crossover filtering, but to correct the drivers’ individual responses based on measurements, producing zero phase shift for each driver, and therefore perfect (or as close as possible) acoustic crossovers and zero overall phase shift. EQ such as baffle step correction is overlaid onto the filters’ responses without costing anything extra in CPU power. Individual driver delays are also added. I am not claiming this is unique, but nor is it commonplace. In terms of an active crossover it is the no-compromises version.
I have had this system working for a couple of years on a Windows PC, but Linux will be a cheaper and more elegant solution.
[UPDATE 18/0715] I have it running with the speakers with a choice of two sound cards: Asus Xonar DS and Creative X-Fi. It’s just a case of changing a few characters in the xover config file.
The control loop algorithm for maintaining the average sample rate at input and output (and avoiding any resampling) is an interesting problem to solve and I have had fun trying different algorithms based on PID loops and plotting the result out as a graph. The output sample rate is fixed, set by the card, and has to be inferred from the time between calls to send chunks of data to the output card but there will be a level of jitter on this due to the other things that the multi-threaded program is doing. We know the precise sample rate at the input (the snd-aloop loopback driver) because we are setting it. The aim is to keep the difference between number of samples read and number of samples output to the DACs at a constant level, but as we are sending and receiving chunks of data the instantaneous figure is fluctuating all the time. I presume that similar calculations are being performed in the adaptive resampling that would be usual when connecting together digital audio systems with differing sample rates – the difference being that this would affect the audio (subtly, but it undeniably would), while the aim of my scheme is that the timing adjustments merely affect the fill level of a FIFO, the sample rate being rigidly fixed and defined by the DAC.
[UPDATE 31/07/15]
Feeling confident, I bought an Asus Xonar U7 USB 7.1 sound card. This is based on the CM6632A chipset. I got it working but… trying to set the format to signed 32 bit within my program failed when addressing the device as “hw”. It also failed with S24_3LE and various other sample formats. However, 16 bit was accepted. Consulting the web, people commonly seem to have this issue with both CM6631A and CM6632A on Linux, and their workaround is simply to use “plughw” instead. However, if the “hw” device rejects a format, then, supposedly, the hardware cannot support it. All the “plughw” device does is automatically allow the OS to convert samples from the format you are using into one that the card can use. So I have a feeling that the card is only running in 16 bit mode, regardless of what my code is sending it.
If an application chooses a PCM parameter (sampling rate, channel count or sample format) which the hardware does not support, the hw plugin returns an error. Therefore the next most important plugin is the plug plugin which performs channel duplication, sample value conversion and resampling when necessary.
http://www.volkerschatz.com/noise/alsa.html
[03/08/15 UPDATE] Got back to the house where my system lives after the weekend, and was able to try my Asus Xonar U7 again. This time it accepted S24_3LE! Could this be the issue with hot-plugging versus not hot-plugging that other people on the web have seen? I have a feeling that my previous tests were with the U7 hot-plugged into a PC that was already on. Anyway, I now seem to be in business with the U7 and it sounds good.
It’s Ringo’s 75th birthday. Here’s a refreshingly positive article about his inestimable contribution to the Beatles.
A few weeks ago I wrote about my desire to dump Windows and to go with Linux for audio. The aim is to create an active crossover system that is the best of all worlds:
The goal is to use DSP to replace the passive crossovers that so-degrade conventional speakers’ performance, not merely to use the PC as a ‘media hub’. The Linux-based audio system can do this, and despite its workaday image represents the ultimate hi-fi source component. Hi-fi sustains an industry, and hordes of enthusiasts are prepared to spend real money on it. What an interesting thought, therefore, to realise that as a source there will never be any need for a better component than the ‘Linux box’. Here exists a system, a general purpose number cruncher that is powerful enough for all audio applications, bristling with connectivity, easy to equip with digital to analogue converters whose raw fidelity have long surpassed the limits of human hearing, and yet (if you use an old, surplus PC) costs less than a Christmas cracker toy to own – unlike an equivalent Windows PC.
Regardless, reading around the web on the subject, for my active crossover system I seem to either have unique requirements that no one has ever thought of, or my requirements are just so trivial as to be not even worth writing down by anyone. I am still not sure which it is…
On the face of it Linux seems to have audio covered and then some, but in amongst the fantastically comprehensive JACK solution I don’t really feel I know what is going on. It feels like overkill. Is the audio being resampled? I think I need a simpler solution.
Just to summarise the thinking behind my requirements:
That last requirement is what the whole thing is about. It is nothing to do with conversion between 48 kHz and 44.1 kHz, or 96 kHz and 192 kHz, but is about the resampling that would be necessary in going from 44.0999 kHz to 44.10001 kHz, for example; if the source and DAC are at nominally the same sample rate, but use separate crystal clocks they will drift apart over time. This can be handled using adaptive resampling of the audio stream in software. Resampling would involve extra DSP, so even if I was happy that no audible degradation was occurring, it would be sapping more CPU power than was necessary, or relying on a particular type of sound card that does its own resampling.
The alternative is to ensure that the source and DAC are synchronised in terms of their average sample rates. The DAC will have a fixed, rigid sample rate, so the only rate that can vary is the source and, if the source is a stream of bytes from an audio application (e.g. a media player program), this synchronisation can be arranged by requesting chunks of data from the source only when the DAC is ready to receive it. A First-In-First-Out (FIFO) buffer is loaded with these chunks of data, and the data is streamed out to the DAC continuously.
I would like to think I have now found the solution using Linux. I would be very grateful if any Linux gurus out there would care to correct me if I am wrong on any of this:
After a few days of wrestling with this, my experience is as follows:
You may find it hard to get excited by this stuff, but not me: it’s a case of feeling that I own the system rather than my recent experiences that showed that with Windows the system is merely ‘under licence’ from Microsoft and the hardware vendors.