WASAPI or DirectSound

nicknack35 · 29 Jun 2017 at 20:44

Evening all could somebody tell me please im currently using Musicbee only found out about it just recently. Im using a MF V90 dac which is connected to my Ruarks and the dac is connected to my PC via USB now the settings in Musicbee in the player settings i have WASAPI - DirectSound and ASIO which would give me the better sound quality would i better use WASAPI over DirectSound?

hornetstinger · 29 Jun 2017 at 20:48

go for wasapi.

nicknack35 · 29 Jun 2017 at 20:56

Jeez What a difference in sound Quality to think i had mine set at DirectSound whats the difference between these 2 and why does it sound better using WASAPI

hornetstinger · 29 Jun 2017 at 20:58

https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php/topic,94411.0.html

nicknack35 · 29 Jun 2017 at 22:40

Can someone help me please when im playing my music on MusicBee player when i have the volume to where i want it when i skip forward on the player the music goes very loud when i resume any ideas why this is ive looked in settings and cannot see anything that might be causing this. Should it be doing this? Currently using WASAPI never did this in DirectSound

jpaul · 30 Jun 2017 at 18:38

I did not see any difference with WASAPI , providing I had disabled the (DIRECTSOUND) windows sound effects/processing and given exclusive access to applications,
that was with a PCI sound card.
If I was doing music production maybe the lower latency would be helpful.
I have had to use the dpc latency tool in the past to identify drivers that were causing sound glitches.

hornetstinger · 30 Jun 2017 at 19:01

jpaul said:
I did not see any difference with WASAPI , providing I had disabled the (DIRECTSOUND) windows sound effects/processing and given exclusive access to applications,
that was with a PCI sound card.
If I was doing music production maybe the lower latency would be helpful.
I have had to use the dpc latency tool in the past to identify drivers that were causing sound glitches.

Noticed it straight away. For one thing it was bit perfect, and no upsampling was going on. Passed DTS CD audio digitally. DS won't do that.

jpaul · 30 Jun 2017 at 21:57

hornetstinger said:
Passed DTS CD audio digitally. DS won't do that

by DTS CD do you mean multichannel 5.1 & 24/192 ?
(I am not that familiar, although recent thread about surround sound concerts there was some concurrence
that surround channels generally artificially engineered, as opposed to genuine microphones at the event.)

DS does 2.0 & 24/96 (also one of the streams tidal offers, I rip vinyl at that too)

hornetstinger · 1 Jul 2017 at 07:57

Bit perfect means the output is the same as the played material. If you play a CD with DTS or HDCD encoded audio, then the DAC should light up with that.

if it loses the DTS or HDCD encoding then there's conversion going on. I use that as a test to check whether it's working or not.

Of course if you can see 48khz from CD then also upconverting going as well

jpaul · 1 Jul 2017 at 08:15

I had thought DTS cd ' s were typically lossy ac3/encoding not PCM ?, so bit perfect less important even if it is 5.1 24/192,
and if with DS it had downsampled to 24/96 say, not a big additional loss ?

But you can send genuine PCM 2.0 24/96 via direct sound , so arguably better quality

nicknack35 · 1 Jul 2017 at 18:36

hornetstiger in my MusicBee settings it says upsampling 48/96/192 now my DAC is 24/96 am i better off having this disabled or choosing 96

hornetstinger · 1 Jul 2017 at 18:42

Don't use upsampling.
Nope, DTS CDs are not lossy, they're 44.1khz 16bit PCM. Although you can get other sampling rate and bit DTS PCM files.

WSAPASI bypasses the windows mixer.

If your source is 16 bit 44khz, you want the output from your computer 16 bit 44khz.

jpaul · 3 Jul 2017 at 14:18

what is the the PC/htpc solution for bit-accurate playback of streaming services (Tidal/spotify) ? which is a large part of my consumption
MusicBee does not seem to provide a solution.

Maybe these are specifically disallowed by streamers to prevent illicit stream capture
all that I can see that might address this is HIFI-CABLE & ASIO-Bridge (Donationware)
(I saw the reference here https://www.reddit.com/r/headphones/comments/4vmqp3/my_loweffort_highquality_audio_setup_guide/ ) Did anyone try this ?

afaik ASIO4ALL driver does not provide a solution (a new windows asio sound device), since it is only a driver for players that are already ASIO aware.

Just discovered that most youtube sound is 44.1Khz and that BBC uses 48Khz so should manually change DirectSound config for these sources.