Audio quality, Eva soundtracks, and hearing aids

Listening to music when working to drown out everything but what I’m concentrating on has long been the way I’ve done things, and sound quality is important to me.

When I’ve had housemates, I always used my Sennheiser HD 650 Open Back headphones along with an RME Babyface Pro for custom wave tuning. To perfectly tune the waveforms so it sounded the best to me, I spent many hours listening to the same sound clips over and over, ones that I’d already heard thousands of times before and knew impeccably.

Now that I’ve had my house to myself for a while, I always listen to everything through surround sound (I have my house wired for 7.1 in my office, living room, and bedroom). While the sound quality is a pretty big step down, I really enjoy being immersed in the music, coming in from all directions. Any headphones I’ve tried just can’t simulate that experience.

I generally just listen to stereo tracks that are upmixed (upmuxed?) to 7.1, which gives me what I want. Actual surround sound music tracks are rare, and it’s even more rare that they are actually good.

In 1996 there were 5 Eva (Neon Genesis Evangelion) OST CDs released, and in December of 2004 they were rereleased with 5.1 surround editions. I have acquired copies of the first 3 of these CDs and the surround mixes are phenomenal. I’ve been saddened by the fact I don’t have the 5th CD (I’ve found a physical copy online I intend to grab soon) as it contains one of my favorite Eva songs, “Komm, süsser Tod”.

It recently came to my attention that there was a “Neon Genesis Evangelion 5.1ch Surround Edition Soundtrack” released in 2015 that has that song and I finally acquired it today. Unfortunately, the surround remix on this CD is horrible and I deleted it after listening all the way through. Very disappointing.

Another fun tidbit. I’ve lost a good deal of my hearing ranges from playing percussion in instrumental band in high school. I recently went to an audiologist and tried out hearing aids and HOLY CRAP, everything in life suddenly sounds so much better and crisper. The Oticon Intent hearing aids are absolutely amazing. The best versions (#1) definitely give the best quality. The lowest tier version (#3) didn’t cut it for me. I’m probably going to settle with the mid-tier version (#2) due to price vs quality loss.

Using these hearing aids is a huge step for me in bridging the gap to listening to music out loud and through my Sennheisers. And what really surprised me was that using the hearing aids actually enhanced the sound quality when listening through my Sennheisers.

To adjust the hearing aids to my needs I went through a 10-ish minute test in a sound booth in which all the ranges of my hearing were testing, so the hearing aids could boost the different ranges to match my hearing loss. What really made me smile was when I compared the hearing range loss chart with the waveform I came up with for my Babyface. They were almost exactly matched. Which tells me I haven’t lost much more hearing in the last decade.

RME Babyface Pro in Linux

An exercise in patience

After years of saying I’d do it, I'm finally moving my ecosystem from Windows to Linux. After some experimenting and soul searching, I've decided to go with Linux Mint, as it's not exactly Ubuntu with their atrociously horrible decisions, but it provides stability, ease of setup, and a similar enough interface to Windows so as to not lower my productivity.

Getting all of my legacy hardware working, including my 6-monitor setup, was mostly painless, but my beloved Babyface Pro (external professional audio mixer hardware) has been absolute hell to get working. It only natively supports Windows, OSX, and iOS for the “PC” (USB audio passthrough) mode, and the CC mode (class compliant) does not offer my custom waveform transforms. So, my only real option was to use the other analog input interfaces on the Babyface (XLR, SPDIF, or quarter inch audio).

The first hurdle was the power. Normally the device is powered through USB, however if I was going to be using the other audio inputs, I didn't want to leave the USB plugged in all the time, and the Babyface doesn't come with a power adapter. Fortunately, I had a 12V 1A+ power adapter in my big box of random power adapters. The second hurdle was when I discovered that the Babyface does not store the mixer settings when it's powered off. So, every time it gets powered on, it needs to be hooked to another (Windows) machine that can push the mixer settings to it. This also isn't too big a deal as I keep it on a UPS so it generally won't lose power, and if it does, I can use a VM to push the settings.

The next problem was deciding what interface to go through. I was really hoping to use SPDIF/optical since it is a digital signal that does not suffer from interference and degradation, but all the SPDIF interfaces I tried (4 in total) all sounded like garbage. I guess the SPDIF interface on the Babyface is a piece of Junk, which was very disheartening.

My only remaining option was using the analog inputs. I decided to use a mini (3.5mm; 1/8") stereo to quarter inch (6.35mm) mono splitter cord to run into “IN 3/4” and this worked perfectly. However, if the USB interface is plugged in at the same time then this actually creates very audible line noise on the analog inputs within the Babyface itself! This is a horrible design flaw of the device that I was shocked to run into. Fortunately, as mentioned in step 1, I already planned on having the USB cord unplugged, so not a deal breaker.

I first tried the headphone and line out jacks on my motherboard, but the audio quality was only at about 90%. I next tried the line out on my Creative Sound Blaster Audigy from 2014 and the audio was at about 95% quality. It also felt like a cardinal sin to plug in a PCIE 1.0 1x device (0.250 GB/s) into a PCIE 5.0 16x slot (63 GB/s) - lol. So, I bought a Sound Blaster Play 3! USB to mini audio adapter and the audio was perfect! I finally had my setup figured out.

As a fun note, I went to an audiologist a few days ago to have my hearing tested, and the waveform I had devised (through brute force testing) that I had been using through the Babyface for the last 7 years was the exact inverse of the results on the hearing loss frequency chart.

Babyface Pro Volume Modification via Mousewheel

Part of my workstation’s audio setup uses the RME Babyface Pro. Until the most recent update of their software, the built-in Window’s sound’s master volume for the device was ignored. So while this script isn’t as important as before, I still find it very useful. So the following is an AutoHotkey script which modifies the master volume in the TotalMix FX window via the mousewheel (when alt+ctrl is held down). This expects the TotalMix FX window to be sized as small as it can, and to have a channel selected for the control room’s Main Out. It should look like this:

The script is as follows:

;Function to create lparam/wparam for SendMessage
CalculatePARAM(w1, w2)
{
	IfLess, w1, 0
		w1 := 65535 + w1 + 1
	IfLess, w2, 0
		w2 := 65535 + w2 + 1

	return (w2<<16 | w1)
}

;Send a mouse wheel action to a window
SendMouseWheel(WindowHWND, Steps, XPos, YPos)
{
	;Constants
	WM_MOUSEWHEEL := 0x20A
	WheelStepAmount := 120

	;Calculate and execute the message
	WinGetPos, ScreenX, ScreenY,,, ahk_id %WindowHWND%
	wparam := CalculatePARAM(0, Steps*WheelStepAmount)
	lparam := CalculatePARAM(XPos+ScreenX, YPos+ScreenY)
	SendMessage, %WM_MOUSEWHEEL%, %wparam%, %lparam%,, ahk_id %WindowHWND%
}

^!WheelUp::
ControlGet, ControlHWND, Hwnd,,AfxFrameOrView100s1,RME TotalMix
if ControlHWND
	SendMouseWheel(ControlHWND, 1, 36, 428)
return

^!WheelDown::
ControlGet, ControlHWND, Hwnd,,AfxFrameOrView100s1,RME TotalMix
if ControlHWND
	SendMouseWheel(ControlHWND, -1, 36, 428)
return