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Ah. That indeed makes a difference.

Posted by Presto (A) on April 10, 2007 at 13:16:57

In Reply to: Yes except the quality difference is night and day. posted by Yashu on April 10, 2007 at 11:46:13:

You stumbled across yet another PC Audio myth.

"One thing I forgot to say... This could be an issue with ASIO4ALL since I am assuming it works like a wrapper to allow any card to use ASIO."

ASIO4ALL is a WDM ASIO wrapper. It basically adds latency control to a Kernel Streaming process and calls it "ASIO". It's not true ASIO - it was intended to give latency control to WDM card users. Audiophiles get "high" on the word ASIO, so they assumed that ASIO4ALL would "Get them ASIO" which is really not what is happening. If you need ASIO4ALL for a device in the first place, it's because you don't HAVE a recongnizable or functional ASIO driver, and need to "wrap" ASIO4ALL around a WDM driver. ASIO4ALL is not a true ASIO driver, nor is it a true "generic" ASIO driver for all devices. This would be impossible. It is simply an ASIO emulator to add latency control - something we really don't even need in 2 channel reproduction, unless long DSP processing times for crossover functions or EQ/room correction algorithms are causing dropouts.

The thing about ASIO4ALL versus kernel streaming is that you are still basically bypassing the Windows Audio Stack - you're just doing it in a slightly different way.

Using ASIO4ALL plus an ASIO output plugin will be piping bit-perfect audio to the same "pins" that a Kernel Streaming output plugin uses. The advantage of ASIO4ALL is that you can select different devices for input and output. But if you don't need that functionality, basic kernel streaming will get you the same SQ.

As for Audigy4, that's quite old tech now. I've seen numerous complaints on various forums about "buggy" ASIO drivers for that product. I am using ASIO drivers for the X-Fi X-treme Music and having no problems - just amazingly good sound for $125. The digital out is also supported under ASIO which is a nice touch.

The trick with Creative products is SHUTTING OFF what you don't want on!

Cheers,
Presto

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