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After lurking on AVF discussions about Ms Vista and here on AA I decided to try it myself.In a word, wow !
My previous configuration was:
S/w:
W2K (tweaked to the max, all uneccessary parts and services uninstalled/disabled)
Jriver MC11 with ASIO output and ASIO driver for Waveterminal external card.Files were apple lossless and wav.
H/w:Waveterminal sending signal via glass toslink to Behringer SRC2496
Reclocked and upsampled (88.2/24) signal sent from Behringer to
Panny SA-XR45 digital receiver via glass toslink.
The tweaking of W2K took a lot of reading and hours of tedious work with automated scripts and manual claeanup. The result was much better sound than with everything running.Then I installed Vista (clean install). Player was again MC11, but this time output was wave and driver was MS USB audio driver, not ASIO.
I did not tweak anything in Vista and let it run as it is. The difference was huge, comparable to replacing run of the mill CD player with really good one.
This is only half of the story. Deep buried in USB driver "properties" tab is the real audio gem - room correction feature.
I can not wait to see what kind of application will appear that will use this feature. Tact people should be concerned.
I would like to start with tweaking Vista to see if even better results are possible.
Any experiences?
Also, does anyone have a list of blogs of Ms audio development team?
Follow Ups:
From what I can tell, your old setup should have been passing bit-perfect 44.1 to your Behringer, and the new Vista setup is likely passing upsampled 48 to your Behringer (unless you got it to work in exclusive mode somehow), which shouldn't sound as good.I assume you had serious problems attaining bit-perfect digital output in your old setup, did you ever run Rightmark or any other audio tests to see what was going wrong? If not, please do so on both systems so we can all see what the differences are and hopefully illustrate out any problems you may still be experiencing in your current setup.
Is Vista allowing the easy passthrough of untampered digital stream... or is it still going through something like the kmixer that redigitizes the music signal?
The answer as you phrased is no - digital stream is outside of kernel, only driver resides there.The key is: Does Vista provide bitperfect output or not?
I am still looking for straight "YES" or "NO" answer, not 50 page doucuments where the answer is buried.Microsoft says that ASIO is not important any more. But bitperfect is, regardless what they think, because they thought that "no one needs more than 640k".
***Does Vista provide bitperfect output or not?***The way I understand it, Vista includes the ability to select "Exclusive Mode" which apparently would eliminate the need for ASIO as we know it. This should provide bit perfect. However, the irony is that Windows Media Player will not support "Exclusive Mode" except, I think, only when passing AC3 or DTS to S/PDIF output (as in during playback of a DVD).
So I think we'll still have to rely on 3rd party programs (such as foobar) to take advantage of "Exclusive Mode".
So, basically, Windows Vista is now digitally manipulating your lossless audio into something else. It's great that you like the way it sounds, but doesn't it concern you that this software (which is probably doing something like the digital equivalent of a loudness button and a generic 8x8 room correction) is manipulating the sound that you were so painfully trying to preserve before upgrading to Vista?
I am not using room correction feature at all, but find it interesting that poor man's Tact is around the corner.
It is here now without Vista.
As another poster said - I'm glad it's working for you.Unless there were some compelling reason, and it would have to be pretty compelling, I prefer not to upgrade on MS operating systems until the 2nd service pack is out.
They have a history of not getting it right the first time.
Usually don't get it right the 2nd time (service pack one).
On top of that, the various other software and hardware manufacturers usually take a while to get their end up to snuff.
Life's just too short to jump right into a new MS product, IMHO.
Here is a thread authored by Vista engineer.BTW, I talked to a lot of pro audio compnaies, both soundcard and software companies at AES. The general consensus is that Microsoft keeps changing the sound specs and they are frustrated with driver development and compatibility with MS. Many are not going to release drivers until sometime after Vista is released, so they can get it right. Also, most editing and DAW vendors said that it was going to be hard to get good sound out of Vista, because MS is doing so much at lower levels of the operating system that is messing with things like latency etc. I also heard from several sources that ASIO will still be needed because of latency issues.
But, it's great to hear you have had success with yours!
I came across this blog awhile back. He hasn't talked about audio in awhile, but he had some good stuff actually about a year ago. Perhaps you've already seen (read) it. But if not, here it is: This is the page from September (2005). Start by reading Sept. 19, and then the 20th, 21st, and 23rd.
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