Soundcard with 3rd octave eq

[Dirk Bruere at NeoPax]

Does anyone know of a soundcard with a third octave equalizer?

--
Dirk

http://www.transcendence.me.uk/ - Transcendence UK
http://www.theconsensus.org/ - A UK political party
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/onetribe - Occult Talk Show

 

[Dirk Bruere at NeoPax]

Waht do you mean by 'third octav/".
http://apmr.matelys.com/Standards/OctaveBands.html

Most soundcard equalizers are done in software.
http://panteltje.com/panteltje/xpequ/index.html

That means you can probably add whatever you want...
?

Thanks.
The problem is that my application cannot be the one that actually plays
the audio. That would be something like WMP, Zoom, PowerDVD etc.
I need the s/w to fit between those apps and the output of the sound card.

--
Dirk

http://www.transcendence.me.uk/ - Transcendence UK
http://www.theconsensus.org/ - A UK political party
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/onetribe - Occult Talk Show

 

[Dirk Bruere at NeoPax]

Well that is exactly what xpequ can do, I am using it with 2 sound cards.
One digitises the sound, feeds it to the xpequ equaliser (and AGC),
and xpequ outputs it via the other soundcard.
There is a real time delay (latency), can be used for echo
I have not bothered to see if I could decrease that delay.
It is likely related to the soundcard buffer sizes.

Any idea how long the delay is?

--
Dirk

http://www.transcendence.me.uk/ - Transcendence UK
http://www.theconsensus.org/ - A UK political party
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/onetribe - Occult Talk Show

 

[Dirk Bruere at NeoPax]

From 10 or so milli seconds to maybe a hundred, sounds like a real echo.
There is one issue with this, if you use 2 sound cards, each with their own crystal,
you get irregularities if for example data is read faster (say at 44100) then written (also at 44100).
If you have a sound card with multiple channels on it, running from the same crystal, it should be OK though.
At least this is my theory of what happens, may well be wrong...

For example I have a Creative 32 PCI, and a Soundblaster Live.
The Live resamples everything, and has 2 channels, I think on the same clock.
I have seen problems using the SB PCI32 as input and the SB Live as output.

IIRC I could send from one channel of the SB live to the other, but thanks to Alsa sound system
now installed and replacing OSS sound drivers this no longer seems to work.
I had /dev/dsp0 (PCI32) and /dev/dsp1 and /dev/dsp2 (SB Live), and
now Alsa no longer seems to see the second dsp device on the Live.
So to make a long story short, it may or may not work reliable on your system.
Of course it will always work reliable when playing from a wave or mp3 file.

I just tested some things, nice echo bathroom sound if I feed output of both sound cards to a speaker...
xpequ -u plughw:0,0 -t plughw:1,0 (PCI32 via equaliser to SB Live).
But this way I get an alsa buffer overflow after a while.

That seems to depend on system load too, been running OK now for 10 minutes.
So YMMV.
Of course you could make a hardware equaliser too

We already buy in a h/w EQ at $300 a shot. A piece of shit as it turns
out, but the only game in town so far.
Hence the desire for a s/w replacement to run under XP.
Even so, if I could get a DSP board that would do 3rd octave, hold 20
presets and be controllable over a LAN (even via ethernet/USB/RS232),
SPDIF to SPDIF I'd buy it like a shot for the same price.

--
Dirk

http://www.transcendence.me.uk/ - Transcendence UK
http://www.theconsensus.org/ - A UK political party
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/onetribe - Occult Talk Show

 

[JosephKK]

We already buy in a h/w EQ at $300 a shot. A piece of shit as it turns
out, but the only game in town so far.
Hence the desire for a s/w replacement to run under XP.
Even so, if I could get a DSP board that would do 3rd octave, hold 20
presets and be controllable over a LAN (even via ethernet/USB/RS232),
SPDIF to SPDIF I'd buy it like a shot for the same price.

I would be VERY surprised to get a 1/3 active EQ that actually works right for less than $1000, used.
Do you really need real-time EQ? Does it really need to be 1/3 octave?

 

[Paul Keinanen]

I would be VERY surprised to get a 1/3 active EQ that actually works right for less than $1000, used.
Do you really need real-time EQ? Does it really need to be 1/3 octave?

Depending on what you are trying to achieve, but in some cases a
parametric EQ might be a more suitable alternative.