Jim the Oldbie
My right elbow hurts.
Hi Kids.
I'm throwing this out here just in case there might be one or two who have experienced similar issues using Foobar2000 with HDMI audio. (Plus, I just hadda tell somebody, and I figured you guys would understand, heh.)
It goes without saying that I'm really, really enjoying my home audio system these days. The sound itself is just blissfully good. Any lingering issues I have are mostly functional.
One of these has to do with various random glitches that occur with changes in the HDMI audio stream, mostly involving sample rate or channel count. These changes can sometimes cause a momentary glitch in the audio at the beginning of a song while the hardware shifts gears. They're usually brief, but they can certainly be distracting, even a bit jarring at times. This I could almost live with. But because of the somewhat unorthodox HDMI routing in my setup, there are also times when things get so confused that the audio just quits, or comes back with a part missing, like no center channel or something. This of course is a more serious matter requiring a reset of the HDMI splitter at least, or sometimes a reboot of the music PC. Bummer.
I've been dealing with the sample rate changes by using one of the high-quality resamplers in Foobar's DSP section to output a constant 96KHz regardless of source material. After a lot of A/B listening tests, I've been unable to detect any degradation in the sound caused by this resampling. So far so good. But there remained the problem with channel configuration; I was still having trouble switching from stereo to multichannel, for example. I had resigned myself to limiting my listening sessions to one format or another; but that's no way to live, man.
Last night I discovered a Foobar component that solves this problem as well: Foobar2000 Channel Mixer. Its main purpose is to do things like upmixing on the fly, adding a subwoofer channel & other stuff. But since all that is done elsewhere in my system, I have it all switched off. I just use the one basic feature, which is to activate 6-channel output at all times, without altering the source material in any way. This works perfectly; any unused channels are simply silent. I now have a clean, stable, 6-channel @ 96KHz output from Foobar, and no more confusion downstream! I was up til 4 AM this morning, jumping back & forth all over the music server without a single glitch! (My ass is draggin' today, though - I'm getting too old for all-night listening sessions.
)
Epilogue: There is another, simpler way to achieve this in Windows, which is to simply use DirectSound and assign the default channels & sample rate there. I tried this, and it also cures the HDMI glitches, but I swear to god it does not sound as good. I know this is a subjective evaluation, and I know it's been said that Windows has improved their sample-rate conversion over the years. But man, it sure sounds to me like there's something going on there. Doing it all in Foobar allows me to use their quality converter and continue using WASAPI, to bypass whatever kinda weird shit the Windows mixer may be trying to do. And it sounds goooood.
I'm throwing this out here just in case there might be one or two who have experienced similar issues using Foobar2000 with HDMI audio. (Plus, I just hadda tell somebody, and I figured you guys would understand, heh.)
It goes without saying that I'm really, really enjoying my home audio system these days. The sound itself is just blissfully good. Any lingering issues I have are mostly functional.
One of these has to do with various random glitches that occur with changes in the HDMI audio stream, mostly involving sample rate or channel count. These changes can sometimes cause a momentary glitch in the audio at the beginning of a song while the hardware shifts gears. They're usually brief, but they can certainly be distracting, even a bit jarring at times. This I could almost live with. But because of the somewhat unorthodox HDMI routing in my setup, there are also times when things get so confused that the audio just quits, or comes back with a part missing, like no center channel or something. This of course is a more serious matter requiring a reset of the HDMI splitter at least, or sometimes a reboot of the music PC. Bummer.
I've been dealing with the sample rate changes by using one of the high-quality resamplers in Foobar's DSP section to output a constant 96KHz regardless of source material. After a lot of A/B listening tests, I've been unable to detect any degradation in the sound caused by this resampling. So far so good. But there remained the problem with channel configuration; I was still having trouble switching from stereo to multichannel, for example. I had resigned myself to limiting my listening sessions to one format or another; but that's no way to live, man.
Last night I discovered a Foobar component that solves this problem as well: Foobar2000 Channel Mixer. Its main purpose is to do things like upmixing on the fly, adding a subwoofer channel & other stuff. But since all that is done elsewhere in my system, I have it all switched off. I just use the one basic feature, which is to activate 6-channel output at all times, without altering the source material in any way. This works perfectly; any unused channels are simply silent. I now have a clean, stable, 6-channel @ 96KHz output from Foobar, and no more confusion downstream! I was up til 4 AM this morning, jumping back & forth all over the music server without a single glitch! (My ass is draggin' today, though - I'm getting too old for all-night listening sessions.
)Epilogue: There is another, simpler way to achieve this in Windows, which is to simply use DirectSound and assign the default channels & sample rate there. I tried this, and it also cures the HDMI glitches, but I swear to god it does not sound as good. I know this is a subjective evaluation, and I know it's been said that Windows has improved their sample-rate conversion over the years. But man, it sure sounds to me like there's something going on there. Doing it all in Foobar allows me to use their quality converter and continue using WASAPI, to bypass whatever kinda weird shit the Windows mixer may be trying to do. And it sounds goooood.
