[MPlayer-users] Getting the best sound from mplayer

[Grant]

...
>> > In mplayer. This is probably where you lose most quality, anyway. If you
>> > are forced to listen to multichannel signal on stereo system, the
>> > default resampler might not be what you desire. Mplayer supports
>> > downmixing for headphones (use -channels 6 -af volume=-5,hrtf. If you
>> > hear cracking of sound at loud scenes, use bigger volume reduction, like
>> > volume=-10,hrtf) and you can emulate various multichannel-to-stereo
>> > conversion formulas, like
>> [...]
>>
>> The downmix is automatically done by mplayer (a pan filter is added in
>> case the codec doesn't support the downmix). You can disable it with
>> -channels 6 for example.
>
> I know, but that's exactly where problem lies. Some codecs, like ac3 for
> example, have "internal downmix" that works way too strange. Which is
> why using -channels 6 -af pan ... is much better, IMHO. I simply don't
> know any other way of mplayer not using these strange ways of downmixing
> and always rely on pan filter. It would've been much better if mplayer
> only used codec information only to get channel order and could always
> downmix with audio filter, not inside codec..

mplayer devs, Vladimir is absolutely right.  Downmixing via a good pan
filter instead of via the codec sounds much, much better.  Can
mplayer's default behavior be changed to downmix via a good pan filter
instead of via the codec?

- Grant