Heh, wouldn't you know I'd be up for a little more audio experimenting on these evenings off?
: Anyway, I figured I'd see since my soundcard can support 5.1 surround sound, just how it would work. Having an analog output and some old Sony SRS-A21's lying around I made them my rear speakers and went searching for the appropriate setup for a software player.
TheKMPlayer can natively do 5.1 setups and the output was very good, however, there seems to be some kind of unexplained normalizing going on because the points in scores where the music is meant to grow, it never "grew" so to speak. I made sure all the normalizers were off, and no volume leveling was present but the issue did not go away (imagine the strong creschendo at the end of LBT's End Credits track just being pretty flat
)
Confused, I tried to see if I could find anything appropriate for foobar or winamp. There was something out there called AndrewLabs ATSurround Processor and there were versions for both Winamp and foobar. I took the foobar plugin and configured it. The sound is just as good as the output the KMPlayer gave, only I could configure it even further, and there was no quasi-normalizing going on. Loud parts in songs still got loud when they were supposed to.
B) I haven't tried the headphone mode yet, but supposedly its supposed to make it sound like the music is less "in your head" and more on a concert soundstage.
Naturally a plugin like this is more suited to orchestral or chamber music, and less useful for pop. Depending on the setup and configuration you could lose the lead vocalist but I didn't have an issue.
