I am working on a setup which has no centre speaker or subwoofers. The speakers are full range and there is no way to accommodate a similarly sized centre speaker in the equipment rack.
There are also 4x Atmos speakers installed, but I’m not overly concerned as of yet since Roon doesn’t yet support Atmos.
What I’m finding is that the channel mapping only allows for 5.1 or 7.1 setups, and when playing surround audio I notice that the centre channel information is missing.
Is there a way for Roon to fold the centre/LFE channel info into the front L/R speakers?
You didn’t mention the playback components. What are you using (receiver, preamp with separate amps)? A receiver or preamp should have onboard controls for this. My Denon receiver has that feature with the center channel sent to the left/right front speakers. I prefer multi-channel music over Stereo, and home theater, so I have a 7.2.6 speaker arrangement but I do recall seeing the feature to route the center channel to the front.
It’s possible Roon has something similar but I’m not aware of it.
In the AV world you would map your connected speakers on the AV receiver telling it to split the centre between L and R. I came out of that world in 2006 so I’ve no idea if it is different now!
You can use procedural/EQ in Roon’s DSP feature to do this.
The playback device will eventually be an ExaSound S88, but they tell me that the device will not do any channel/bass management.
The processor is a Trinnov Altitude32 (conneted to the 5.1 analog in). However, although Altitude will fold the LFE into the L/R channels, it doesn’t fold the centre into L/R
Good choice on the S88. Currently have the original version. On the list for upgrade to MKII when the components are available. It does have some speaker controls but no bass management.
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Thank you, I just found this feature. Do I simply mute the centre and sub channels in the speaker setup? Or would it be the ‘Mix’ option?
Right, that will do the trick on the Pre (disabling the center and the subwoofer in the speaker setup).
But: In this case, you’ll use the bass management and so the Pre will digitalis the analogue input and so the external exaSound DAC (I’m using an e68 without any DSP) makes not really a sense.
Better will be to use a DSP in front of the DAC in Roon itself or Hqplayer.
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Yes. You want to have:
FL contain LF + 1/2 C +1/2 LFE
FR contain LF + 1/2 C +1/2 LFE
Center Muted
What you do with the SL/SR depends on whether those channels can support LFE.
There are more precise algorithms but this is the idea.
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I’m having a little bit of trouble seeing specifically how this setting is applied. Is there a more detailed guide anywhere for using the procedural EQ options?
Thank you.
I do not know of one but I think it likely that some info has appeared on this forum.