5.1 downmix to stereo

[ra990]

I have a few 5.1 channel albums that I'm playing through my headphones in stereo via wasapi exclusive mode and they sound so much better than even the highest resolution stereo versions of the same albums. I've listened to all the Floyd 5.1 channel albums downmixed to stereo in musicbee and they all sound far superior to any of the SACDs stereo layers. I'm trying to understand why that would be, how is musicbee handling the downmixing? The sense of space in the surround albums really stands out.

[ra990]

Anybody have any ideas about this? Still curious...

This is one of the only players I've encountered that does this downmixing and does it so well. A lot of other players will straight up refuse to play 5.1 tracks if there's only two output channels, others will only play the L/R channels and leave out the others. So, kudos to musicbee.