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That's an audio interface / driver specific phenomemon.

Posted by Presto (A) on December 3, 2007 at 12:23:55

In Reply to: RE: ASIO sound quality compared to DirectSound posted by vulcanman on December 2, 2007 at 13:16:19:

"The windows volume control has no effect when I choose EMU 0404USB as my default audio device."

Does it have no effect at all? Or just no effect when using KS or ASIO? The reason I ask is this is potentially another source of faulty logic. With other devices, you CAN have level control when it's the default audio device. In fact, for most... especially WDM/ASIO hybrid drivers... you DO!

For most other WDM/ASIO capable soundcards, one of two things can happen:

1)The soundcard driver has no mixer and just mimics the Windows mixer funcitons. (In this case, volume control is lost when using KS)
2)The soundcard driver can "slave" the windows level control to the soundcard mixer master level.(In this case, volume control still WORKS when using ASIO or KS!)

The trick is to test for TRUE EXCLUSIVE access and NO KMIXER is to attempt to play two songs at once using two players.

-If you are using KS or ASIO, you CANNOT send a second stream to the audio interface.
-If you are using Waveout or DS, you CAN send a second stream to the audio device and you CAN do this THANKS to kmixer!!
-If you are playing ONLY ONE stream using DS, then kmixer MAY NOT EVEN BE RESAMPLING. (I still need to test this by using direct sound to play a dts file over SPDIF and decode it using an external DTS decoder. If it's kmixed at all, it can no longer be decoded and comes out as noise).

One guy had DTS files working simply by setting the level control in windows to 50% and by playing no other streams.

This guy caused a WHOLE WHACK of confusion because he proved that kmixer is not always resampling, and you CAN get bitperfect playback with a non-ASIO soundcard... so long as level are set to "0db" (aka - no modification to level). A lot of people didn't know 50% slider was 0dbfs in Windows.

Even more don't know 50% slider *can* be 0dbfs in WINAMP too - and may be for ALL devices. I only proved this out for two devices.

Cheers,
Presto

Edits: 12/03/07

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