08/12/2026
Five reviews came in last week. Five stars each — and every one from a different country: the UK, the United States, Spain, Egypt, and Austria.
Five rooms, in five countries, with music playing in them on Fidelia.
Here's what shipped this month, for anyone who cares about the hard part.
Every player worth using lets you tell it where your speakers are. Fidelia also asks the record where its channels belong — and says so when the record doesn't answer.
That join is the whole thing. Your rig is fixed; what a file says about itself is not. On the same setup, untouched: a quad recording's rears reach your rear surrounds, and a 5.1 recording's surrounds reach your sides — because the two files declare different things about their own channels, and Fidelia reads the declaration instead of counting to four. Four channels is quad, or 3.1, or LCRS. Guess wrong and you play a 3.1 record's bass out of a surround speaker. And when a file declares nothing at all, Fidelia reports that it declared nothing, rather than printing "LFE" as though it were a fact.
Around that: 5.1, 7.1, 7.1.4, up to 9.1.6 — sixteen channels. An Output Dashboard that draws your speakers where they actually sit, with a live meter on every one, so a miswired channel is obvious the moment music plays instead of three albums later. Calibration by measurement rather than arithmetic — give each speaker the distance you measured and the nearer ones are delayed to match. Two subwoofers can have different distances, because that is the entire reason to own two.
And the plug-in slots run a bus up to sixteen channels wide. We've pushed a twelve-channel convolution filter through it and measured equal output on all twelve. We don't know of another player that will host your Audio Units that wide — if one exists, we'd genuinely like to know about it.
Multichannel was always on the list. What moved it to the top was customers asking for it, most memorably in a public forum thread from someone running a 23-channel FIR filter set who wanted to know whether Fidelia could feed it. It didn't change what we were building. It changed when we shipped it.
From the woods of northern Minnesota, still the same family studio.
Fidelia 2.12 is on the Mac App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/id416135376 — one purchase, no subscription.
