Here are the LADSPA plugins I use in my software DSP approach to active loudspeakers.  I mostly use them within ecasound, but they should work just as well in any other LADSPA host.

You can download the source code here.  Install with the usual make; make install. Continue reading →

I’ve just finished building a pair of Linkwitz Labs’ LX521 loudspeakers.  They’re everything I could want: 4-way, dipole radiation, with active crossover and eq.  They sound amazing.  Previously the best speakers I had heard were the Pluto 2.1.

What I’ve done differently is to implement the xover/eq with a digital processor, which runs in software on a small pc.  I did this using only open-source, free (as in beer) software, plus a bit of code I wrote myself. Continue reading →

I play most of my music through a Logitech (née SlimDevices) Squeezebox.  It’s a networked music player that pulls audio files from a server running on a separate PC or NAS.  The player runs embedded linux and the server is open-source, so this system is eminently hackable.

By messing with the contents of custom-convert.conf on the server (it lives in /etc/squeezeboxserver on my Ubuntu machine) you can manipulate the audio signal before it goes to the player.  A popular use for this is to get BruteFIR to do “digital room correction”. Continue reading →