V 1.2.7 report back some observations

Hi,

I mentioned before a little about the preference list playback devices being stacked up even after hard-resetting on the headphone or fully disconnected/forget device on pc. Sorry lol my Momentum 4 headphones do have some issues pairing with pc so I kinda just played around with different setup and connectivity mode…the compatibly issues have been kinda the sucking black hole between Windows-bluetooth-sennheiser-applemusic for pc lol, and I think fxsounds coming in the pitfall causes some instability in seamless play through, and the photo shows the main issue about the preference profiles unable to clear themselves out even after a hard reset on the headphones or forget device in windows 11.

To reproduce this just simply pair a headphone, could try changing the name for easily spotting, and disconnect→ forget device, moreover is to hardware reset on the device and in its companion mobile app as well. I’ve been also seeing some strange behavior which I can’t confirm if they’re tied to the preference issue or they’re the cause for preference list’s misbehavior. Though in no way I am trying to achieve anything as they don’t cause much of an issue for me, just merely report back observations:

  1. momentum 4 normally will come as 16 bit, 44.1kHz if dual bluetooth connect mode is on, usually I see fxsound will choose 44.1kHz but the bit will always be 24. if you try to switch to 24bit, 48kHz in fxsound, it will fall back to 44.1kHz no matter what (quite interesting, is it bc the headphones rule over the max actual sample rate allowed?)

  2. Relating to the first one, sooo if Momentum 4 solely connected to my pc only (phone’s bluetooth turned off), refreshing the device will allow the format to go up to 16bit, 48kHz, which now you can switch to 24 bit 48k in fxsound only after you fully exit fxsound and disconnect the device then reconnect+turn on fxsound (this is to counter the issue where fxsound couldn’t recognize the device after either disconnect, out of bluetooth range then come back and swift pair immediately, or device coming back after idle time). this one is kinda weird on the bluetooth headphones themselves imo, but just what I observed how they usually interact with the app.

  3. so this is the tea, I haven’t been able to reproduce this one intentionally. but sometimes when I play around with switching the format (relating to the first 2 observations), when adjusting the sliders in windows volume mixer, fxsound sometimes would freak out and the flicker them sliders (i’d be like “ma’am you good? you’re having a stroke?” ⊙﹏⊙∥ LOL). totally controllable by stopping the playback and exitting fxsound completely, then they work just fine but I usually setting everything up in this order: launching fxsound–>choosing device–> choosing device’s format in sound setting**–>fxsound format**–>adjusting volume sliders in the mixer.

**this is merely cuz the weird 44.1kHz and 48kHz situation I mentioned above but with other earbuds and headphones I don’t need to go these 2 steps

  1. This last one is def relates to Apple Music for Windows, she is the definition of “are you having a good stroke today!?!” lol, love the app and sound quality it provides but it does freak out hard like my daily dose of anxiety. Anytime you switch device in fxsounds or merely click in the device drop will cause Apple Music to either lose sounds momentarily, stop completely, or worst case will freeze like Elsa like Frozen’s 1 near end but this time she crashed lol. (sometimes I do see others like firefox or media player getting confused too whenever switching to different headphones midplay, but they get the harder/hardest time to recognize the device when fxsound is there**. maybe they couldn’t communicate well with fxsound to figure out the output for playback? Idk dont take me 100%)

** by what I meant there, I compared how “responsive” the apps were able to react to the change of devices with and without fxsound running (no fxsound service running nor interface at all). They do seem to recognize the device quicker or easier with less probability of freaking out (not for Apple Music app homie will stroke the moment anything change lol).

Fun fact I learned is momentum 4 highest true lossless format via USB-C is 16 bit, 44.1kHz (apple music will also report the codec and format as ALAC 16bit, 44.1k). I wonder if mr.developer can explain what would really happen to the sound quality since fxsound shows 24bit as default? Does it mean something like “up to” 24bit, xyz kHz or does it really upgrade the quality? (just trynna understand what happen behind the scene and be less dumb day by day myself lol , not that I care about the “must be perfectly highest quality” bullcrap). My truer words are that the music is only gonna be good and better with some twitch and tweaks only if the music is good and not totally shit in the first place a to the men.

The issues in device listing in the preference list is the application bug. The application uses device id as the index when storing the list. But the device id is volatile and changes for the same device. I am working on the fix for this.

FxSound Audio Enhancer device which is used by FxSound for processing audio supports 44.1 kHz and 48 kHz. But the application processing is done on 48 kHz. So, when the application starts processing it resets the format to 48 kHz even if user had set it to 44.1 kHz.

The target audio output device can be 16 bit, 24 bit or 32 bit, 16 kHz to 192 kHz. The purpose of FxSound is to enhance the audio stream and apply processing like quantization and dithering. So, if your momentum headphones support 16 bit, you will not perceive any loss in audio quality from 24 bit to 16 bit due to the processing done by FxSound DSP.

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Thank you for the wisdom! I was typing til read twice and I got what you meant lmao.

does this ever reduce the work for fxsound where source audio comes with lower bitrate which aligns perfectly to what the output device prefer(ish?) to support, thus resulting in a less “heavy traffic”/ lower latency stream through bluetooth? (not perceivable is my vote, but i still ask lol and I do be sorry if that doesn’t make much sense)

Hi @bvijay sorry in advance for the shower of questions, I have done some further reading and now I can’t sleep with more questions lol… If I understand the concept correctly, the reason Fxsound prefers the exclusive mode to be off is to achieve bypassing any internal APO, which it sounds similar to microsoft’s WASAPI or ASIO when these guy take over in Exclusive mode right?

Then I’m stucking my head around:

  1. Does that mean it prefer both my headphone device and fxsound audio enhancer to opt out of exclusive mode in order to bypass the systems APOs altogether?
  2. If so, I’m just kind confusing myself here because for WASAPI it needs exclusive mode on, but for fxsound if it’s off, then will it still be able to bypass the APOs altogether?
Last point #3...

I’m just cooked and might’ve understood the whole thing wrong, whoop.(i blame microsoft docs structure)