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I was messing around with my system last week and I was using DTS NEO on my 2 channel sources using my Pioneer SC-27 as the decoder. I was flipping through the settings and found THX Neural and was completely amazed at how good it sounds and how well it decodes 2 into 5.1!! In A-B ing some of the 5.1 content from SPEC etc, Neural sounds better hands down, even with mp3 sources. In researching this I found that the company was bought by DTS but that it runs separately up in Seattle and the people behind it are pretty impressive. Has anyone played with this before? Is there a PC implementation available anywhere?

Neural DTS was created pretty much for adding some width and depth to movie tracks, has a much more limited and simplistic set of controls, and, oh yeah.....costs you $500.

If you think that's a sounder deal than SPEC, I really don't know quite what to say. I just don't see Neural DTS as a comparison point to what we're attempting to accomplish here.

Thanks for the reply and info - much appreciated!

When I happened on this setting on my SC-27 I was also messing with a few other settings - one of them the Pioneer calls "Fullband Phase Control" which also seems to clean up the sound very nicely. I have done a limited amount of A-Bing but of the few I have done, THX "sounds" better to me. But here is the problem with my testing - when I play a multi-channel FLAC file (from a DTS wav) it is going out without any further processing to the SC-27. When I play any 2 channel mp3, it first gets tweaked by the Isotope Ozone MP DSP which is just the best DSP for making mp3 files sound better and then out to the SC-27.

I think its the combo that is making the difference. That said, what would be really wonderful would be for you to take the spec process and turn it into a winamp compatible DSP application so it can be used in realtime playback. At that point I would be able to compare them on a more equal playing field.

It would probably be worth buying (not a 400 bucks plus a dongel - please). DTS has shown a great propensity to not understanding the PC market and this is just another example of their stupidity.

It is technically possible to do that now, given a player that can use VSTs, because you can use the VST version of Plogue with SPEC running inside it.

I bailed on winamp a while ago so am not up to speed on that but it wouldn't surprise me if there was a VST host plug-in.

Earlier versions of foobar had a VST host plug-in but it doesn't look like it's been updated to foobar 1.x.

Keep in mind, however, that the best results from SPEC come from adjusting things, even on a per song basis, so you will not achieve full quality in a "live" situation.

Having said that, I'd be happy to help you set it up if you find a software player you like that can host VSTs.

Cheers,
Z

Looks like there is a supported VST host plugin for winamp here:



I'll play with it tonight or this weekend.

I was just addressing the technical aspects of using SPEC live. Not the comparison to another product.

Live would be an "off label" use of SPEC, so all bets are off. We already covered the comparison of SPEC to Neural THX for (normal) conversion usage.

Outside of "live", there are some interesting aspects of getting a player like foobar or winamp to "feed" SPEC, for instance if we could get foobar to do it then you could possibly skip a step in converting multiple stereo files to a single album long file, so that is what is interesting me in this thread.

encapsulating foobar as a VST would work better, for that purpose, than running the VST version of plogue inside foobar, but it's all interesting.

Just FYI, while I was able to get Plogue to work in both foobar and winamp, in both cases the VST wrappers only support stereo output so no joy for useing Spec live from those players.

I'm in touch with the foobar VST wrapper author though. We'll see if he has any interest in adding the functionality.