studiomux 5 - poor audio quality with iPhone speaker

Hello – first post here so thank you in advance!

I recently downloaded studiomux 5. My primary use case is to reference mixes from my DAW (Reaper) by streaming to my iPhone (SE 2020).

What I loved about previous versions of studiomux was that the audio is streamed to the phone as if it was being played locally on the device – full quality, full bandwidth, with all the glorious compression and distortion on the tiny phone speaker :wink:

Now in studiomux 5 it appears there is quite a significant reduction in quality, at least on my device. It sounds like the audio is band-limited, with a boost around 600-800hz, making the sound hollow / nasally and essentially unusable for my use-case.

Comparing the same mix played locally on the device and there is no question the sound is radically different with Studiomux.

Has anyone else experienced this? Would appreciate any support – thanks!


iMac Pro (2017)
mac os mojave 10.14.6
studiomux server v5.126
Reaper v6.36, using studiomux VST3 plugin

iPhone SE (2020)
iOS 14.6
studiomux v5.123

Have you recorded the stream from your Mac on the iPhone and played it back to see if it matches the source and then played back the capture to see if it matched what you heard?

Have not tried that exactly, but I agree that would be a good test. I will try that out later.

I’m confident the right stream / bits are making it to iPhone because when using Airpods to listen to the stream, it sounds right.

Only when playing through the phone speaker, it sounds different. So something is happening specifically on the speaker phone use-case.

Hi,

each sample is sent as 32bit integer. Maybe your issue is related to the playback gain issue:

We are working on it.

Best

Hi Pascal, thanks for the reply!

Sounds like it might be a related issue. From what I’ve observed, it’s not just a gain reduction. The audio playback sounds different, it’s missing top and bottom end, and boosted around 600-800Hz.

Interesting enough, I figured out a way to force the audio stream into the correct state, using the AudreIO app–

  1. Begin stream playback from DAW -> Studiomux
  2. Signal degradation is observed
  3. Switch to AudreIO app
  4. Audio continues playing from Studiomux, but now is full bandwidth, no signal degradation.

Seems like switching to AudreIO might force the playback driver into the correct state.

Colin

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