# A review by Stereophile's Kal Rubinson of Dirac Live's multichannel version



## Flak (Nov 15, 2013)

A review of the multichannel version of Dirac Live by Stereophile's Kal Rubinson has been published here:
http://www.stereophile.com/content/music-round-66

 Flavio


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## A Y (Apr 7, 2011)

Hello Flavio,

It's because of Kal's review of the Dirac PC software that I downloaded it this weekend, and tried it out. It's very, very impressive, despite my less than stellar measurement technique and lack of mic calibration.

I'm wondering if you have heard of anyone who is using a Windows PC (or Mac) as a standalone room correction system with Dirac. I have other sources besides the PC, and I'd like the PC to sit between my surround processor and my amplifiers, and act as a standalone room correction device.

For example, I might use a Focusrite 18i20 audio interface to digitize the surround processor's outputs, and then have the 8-channel Dirac output to the audio interface's outputs into the amplifiers. I think I could cobble something together with some scripts and Foobar2000 or sox, but I was wondering if there's anything more official. Thanks!


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## Flak (Nov 15, 2013)

It is generally possible to use a PC as an external DSP processor running Dirac Live stereo... things can get more complicated with the multichannel version.
The above question is of general interest, I'm posting Rickard's answer:

"This should be possible, although it may take some routing to setup and I can't guarantee if it will work with the Focusrite or not. Basically, what you want to look for is in the Windows Sound setup menu > Recording Devices. If you click on one of the devices there (in your case one of the Focusrite inputs) and then click on Properties > Listen. There you can route this recording device to send its signal to a specific playback device, which in this case will be the Dirac Audio Processor (DAP). And then from the DAP you just select the output to your other audio interface. 

Now, in theory this sounds simple, but in my experience, something unexpected may always come up. One thing that you have to look for right away is if the Focusrite has a multi-channel recording device in the Windows Sound setup menu. Very often, the input channels of an audio interface is only represented as stereo pairs in the recording device section (e.g. Focusrite Input 1-2, Focusrite Input 3-4). In that case, it would not be possible to do as above, since if you would mark Listen to this device and route the signal to the DAP for each stereo pair individually, the DAP would just receive a stereo mix of all channels (and not surround). So you will need group together all input channels in the right order for 7.1 surround into one Recording Device before you route it to the DAP. 

So this you need to check with Focusrite and see what their drivers support. Maybe they have some routing options in their mixer or, there may be some third-party software that you can use to sum the channels in the right order into one Playback device, but I don't have any recommendations there right now. If the Focusrite do have a playback device with surround properties, it shouldn't be a problem. 
For Mac, I am personally not sure how to set it up. But I believe they have something similar, where you can route inputs into "Aggregates". So I recommend that you experiment a little with this. If you haven't bought Dirac Live already, you can try the Trial Version while you set it up to see if you can get it to work or not. 

Please let us know how it goes!"


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## A Y (Apr 7, 2011)

Hi Flavio, thanks very much to you and Rickard for this answer. There are certainly challenges, especially with multichannel, and if I come up with anything interesting, I'll let you all know.

I know some people are using PCs as realtime mixers for DJing with many channels, so that's where I'd probably start looking first.


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## Kal Rubinson (Aug 3, 2006)

A Y said:


> Hi Flavio, thanks very much to you and Rickard for this answer. There are certainly challenges, especially with multichannel, and if I come up with anything interesting, I'll let you all know.
> 
> I know some people are using PCs as realtime mixers for DJing with many channels, so that's where I'd probably start looking first.


Others are interested in this, too. I am slowly moving to a system that is entirely PC-based (with DiracLive) but would love to be able to have it play from sources other than files.


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## A Y (Apr 7, 2011)

I'll definitely post something in this thread if I find anything. Right now, it seems the easiest path is just to write something that does it ...


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