Rear and channels sound quiet, poor directionality

[Erik Swan]

I have setup HeSuVi according to the description in the Reddit post, and it seems to be "working" (i.e. the APO is loaded and I can hear the convolution happening on files with reverb), but when running the 7.1 channel surround test, and listening to other 7.1 sources, both side and rear channels are much quieter than all of the front channels, and I have poor directionality with the side and rear speakers (they both kind of sound like they are coming from somewhere side-rear to me).

I think something is definitely wrong, because I have a Logitech G930 with built-in Dolby Headphone, which has much much better directionality and equal volume among all the channels on the same 7.1 test file compared to the Dolby Headphone file in HeSuVi.

Is this normal? Any ideas on how I can start to debug this? It almost feels as if something is downmixing the 7.1 before it gets to HeSuVi.

I'm attempting to use HeSuVi+Equalizer APO with my on-board audio, which is a Realtek ALC1150. Windows 10 Pro 64-bit.

Thanks!

[Erik Swan]

I believe I figured out the issue; I had my headphones plugged into the front headphone jack on my PC. I was under the impression that the rear stereo jack and the front stereo jack were the same thing, since they only showed up as one device in Windows.

However, I found an option in the Realtek HD Audio Manager software to "Make front and rear output devices play back two different audio streams simultaneously", which makes it clear that at some level they are treated as separate devices. Enabling that option makes the front device show up separately in Windows, and makes it clear that it is only a 2-channel device.

When plugging my headphones into the rear jack and enabling HeSuVi, the channels are of roughly equal volume and the directionality is much stronger; everything is working as expected.

I'm not totally sure what was happening with the audio path. By enabling tracing for Equalizer APO, I could see that it was getting an 8-channel input and outputting to an 8-channel output, so it wasn't getting downmixed before the APO I don't think. I'm guessing maybe the Realtek driver was downmixing the HRTF-ed output (which would still be 7.1 channels) to 2.0 for the front jack, instead of leaving it untouched and outputting the L and R channels.

Hope this helps someone out. If it doesn't sound like things are working correctly, plug your headphones into the main stereo output in the rear, not the headphone jack!

EDIT: Same issue as discussed in this comment thread:
https://www.reddit.com/r/headphones/comments/6rtbcb/guide_every_headphone_surround_virtualization_on/dscmeik/

[Matt Gore]

Two fixes (without needing to use the rear port) do already exist in the troubleshooting section of the wiki: https://sourceforge.net/p/hesuvi/wiki/Help/#troubleshooting

Your Realtek driver should have an option like "disable front panel detection" (although I should check if "Make front and rear output devices play back two different audio streams simultaneously" mustn't be activated)