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Computer Audio Asylum Music servers and other computer based digital audio technologies. |
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In Reply to: True posted by Scrith on August 22, 2006 at 23:08:50:
... but I didn't want to dismiss it out of hand, however improbable it may sound. One thing I have learnt in my job is never rule out anything, no matter how improbable. One of my "successes" early on in my career was solving a system performance slowdown that was causing our customer to threaten ligitation - and the cause turned out to be something that everyone else had ruled out as being improbable but I was willing to entertain that it *might* be possible.As an example highlighting the complexity of Windows, one of our inmates discovered a few months ago that you can disable Windows Audio Service and still get sound, and hypothesized that this may be a way of bypassing kmixer.
Unfortunately, it turned out not to be true, after a search revealed the explanation by way of a blog from one of the Microsoft guys working on the audio service.
What actually happens is that disabling Windows audio service disables the user mode DLL that normally intercepts and services Windows multimedia calls, but then these calls then result in setupapi.dll being invoked as a fallback mechanism.
The reason for this redundancy is that setupapi.dll provides a set of services invoked by Windows during initial installation, and obviously there is support for audio even during installation.
setupapi.dll is never meant to be loaded in memory in normal operation as it consumes a fair amount of resources. So what our friend did is actually non-optimal and kmixer (which is a kernel service) is not being bypassed at all.
What has any of this to do with DLLs possibly affecting sound quality? Well, not much, but it does illustrate that the workings of Windows is a lot more complicated than most people think.
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Follow Ups
- I *was* being a bit of a devil's advocate ... - Christine Tham 01:39:34 08/23/06 (0)
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