Did Vista Really improve Sound Quality?

HighlandeR · 6 Apr 2008 at 14:08

I remember during the previews of Vista, MS touted about how its sound was going to be re-written from the ground up and it would offer better sound quality then XP would.

I just wanted to know if this was true ?

Vicar · 6 Apr 2008 at 14:23

From a user point of view, I would say absolutely no difference. Ask anyone with a creative soundcard and they will laugh at that question. But that is more to do with Driver support for the sound products, more than Vista itself.

So in effect from where I am standing, no.

Regards

Vic

Hxc · 6 Apr 2008 at 14:35

Vista has basically removed the kmixer, and as such, yes. Although you'll be hard pressed to tell any difference

Burnsy2023 · 6 Apr 2008 at 14:35

Vicar said:
From a user point of view, I would say absolutely no difference. Ask anyone with a creative soundcard and they will laugh at that question. But that is more to do with Driver support for the sound products, more than Vista itself.

So in effect from where I am standing, no.

Regards

Vic

I'd have to disagree with you there. The Vista sounds stack was totally rewritten, in fact XP was using the same 16bit sound stack the Windows 3.1 had. The new high def 64bit stack is a hugh step forward, especially with it's decent ASIO support

Burnsy

NathanE · 6 Apr 2008 at 15:17

It is improved yes but you need the right content to notice a difference... simply playing the same 192kbit MP3's as you did on XP isn't going to show you the difference.

XP certainly didn't support 192kHz audio did it... and any sound card driver that did attempt it would simply get "resampled down" by the kmixer.sys to 16-bit 44kHz... Nor did it have native DTS and Dolby.

That was a lot of what the competition in the sound card market was about... writing drivers that got around the limits of kmixer.sys (which by the way was essentially unchanged from Windows 95 through to XP). Creative came up with some ingenious "hacks" to get around it. That's why they are having a hard time adapting to Vista. It's sound card driver model is completely different and, essentially, doesn't have any limits. So suddenly they are faced with the prospect of just being able to write a driver without doing any hacks and that means their competitive advantage has been removed. So it's no wonder that Creative has started sending out signals via all channels (ooh a pun!) that it intends to restructure its company and remove the focus on sound card hardware. Just the other week they released a "software X-Fi sound card" which uses the new capabilities of Vista's sound stack and can operate with many sound cards as long as they support one of the more common hi-def codecs like Intel's Azalia.

But there are also functional improvements... such as you can adjust the volume for each Windows application. Each application's audio stream is then mixed into a single combined stream (if no applications have taken exclusive access to the sound stack that is) using the CPU. Which means there is no limits to the number of channels that can be mixed. Whereas normally there would be limits imposed due to the restrictions of the sound card hardware.

No-One · 6 Apr 2008 at 15:29

I got a quality improvment on mine. For some reason I got a constant background hiss in XP. I tried different drivers, muting any and every device but the hiss was still there. Installed Vista and the hiss hasn't been heard since.

NathanE · 6 Apr 2008 at 15:38

Pre-Vista kmixer.sys's flaws can be heard easily on expensive hi-fi amplifiers/speakers. Many people with such hardware back then would use media players that supported a feature called "kernel streaming" (a crude name for ASIO)... but now they don't need to bother because Vista provides a high fidelity sound pipeline by default. ASIO is provided for professional audio applications though which need a direct feed to the outputted signals and low latency.

HighlandeR · 6 Apr 2008 at 22:22

thx for all the answers guys, I think regardless of anyway I look at technology/pcs for today, Vista 64bit is the way to go forward....

Vicar · 6 Apr 2008 at 22:40

Burnsy2023 said:
I'd have to disagree with you there. The Vista sounds stack was totally rewritten, in fact XP was using the same 16bit sound stack the Windows 3.1 had. The new high def 64bit stack is a hugh step forward, especially with it's decent ASIO support

Burnsy

But in effect though is that Driver related at present? I seriously wouldnt doubt you Burnsy. I know you and Nathane know your stuff here, but I have had several Motherboards with onboard Sound and this new one MSI P7N with a daughter board supposedly better and I have yet to tell the difference as I dual boot between XP and Vista 64.

I am guesing though it comes down to hardware such as speakers, or headphones going to Speakers or straight through the SC jack as a factor also. At present I really cant feel a difference either or.