[PascalT]

Just tried wasapi out and it made a huge difference over KS on Vista 64 for me. The sound is much clearer than before.

 

[b0dhi]

I tried listening facing north-south instead of east-west - it made a HUGE difference! EXCELSIOR

 

[maarek99]

Eh...There is no difference between wasapi or even directsound here.

 

[PascalT]

Quote:

Originally Posted by b0dhi /img/forum/go_quote.gif I tried listening facing north-south instead of east-west - it made a HUGE difference! EXCELSIOR

It made a huge difference because KS was probably not working as it should under Vista 64 for me.

Not sure what you're trying to achieve with that comment btw.

 

[b0dhi]

Quote:

Originally Posted by PascalT /img/forum/go_quote.gif It made a huge difference because KS was probably not working as it should under Vista 64 for me. Not sure what you're trying to achieve with that comment btw.

KS is not just for audio. It's a multimedia data streaming layer. It's very hard to imagine a scenario where it would be altering your audio data just enough for it to sound bad with KS but hugely better with WASAPI.

If what you're hearing is real, then it would be an important find. Feel free to prove your hearing by going here and posting your results: http://www.head-fi.org/forums/f46/pu...r-ears-250237/

 

[Mikeb]

To all you sceptics out there it is definitely worth giving WASAPI a try, I have found using WASAPI as the output in Foobar or XMPlay players does provide the best playback results as far as I am concerned. I have compared it to ASIO, direct, and KS and the sound is more open and smoother than the others, the difference is not huge but is incremental with a small but definite improvement in sound quality. My play back system includes Foobar 9.5.5 or XMPlay using WASAPI (no resampling or dsp used) playing high quality flac,ape or wave music files. I think the last part is important in that the benefits of using WASAPI is really only apparent when using one of the higher quality music files, lower quality mp3 files do no not sound that much better. The rest of my playback system includes a Lynx AES16 soundcard (this is the best soundcard I have found) with balanced digital output into a Benchmark dac with balanced outputs into Nuforce amps driving Tannoy 15inch concentric studio monitors, or on the smaller scale Audio Technica ATH AD1000 headphones driven by a Consonance tube headphone amplifier.

 

[hybride]

Did you all try cPlay with resampling and asio4all:
Computer Audio Asylum

I my opinion better then Foobar>Wasapi. The differences are small, but Cplay gives more depth, more stage on my setup. I think it does because they use the optimised secret rabbit code resampler with Best Sinc SNR 145.68db.

plz try and give feedback here.

 

[Mikeb]

Yes Hybride I have used CPlay, I was going to mention it in my last post but I didn't want to confuse matters too much. I downloaded CPlay a couple of day's ago and must agree my initial thoughts are that it is very good possibly the best yet (freeware) particularly when playing back wave files, here I found it excellent, not so sure about flac files however here I thought it was similar to foobar and XM. It is a very basic looking panel (this doesn't worry me but it may others), the main limitations to me at present is that it is restricted to wave and flac files only (do you know of any plugins for ape or monkey files) and I can't see how to add more than one track at a time, also is it limited to XP only, I have only used it with XP as it doesn't mention Vista on its web site. Regarding ASIO4ALL, I don't use this as my soundcards come with thier own asio's. One tweak I have found useful for a slight sound improvement when using a soundcard such as the Lynx aes16 that I use is to turn off the onboard realtek sound within the bios, I thought there was a slight improvement in sound quality, it must be however be stressed that any improvements that I have mentioned are only small but I consider worthwhile particularly as they cost nothing and if you want can be reverted at anytime,I have aslo seen that it can be useful in Foobar to remove the output components that are not used from the foobar plugin components file (best to leave just one output in the file eg WASAPI).

 

[hybride]

Cplay works excellent in Vista, no prob. When loaded a cue file all songs are loaded in the player. At earlier point i had troubles with different file types, so i recoded all my music to FLAC now

And another interested point. I play now with a very cheap $20 soundcard and the excellent! Dogber bitperfect drivers.
This couple BEATS a EMU1212M.
but ohw, this is getting off topic..

 

[Trax416]

Quick question. If I use WASAPI to send a bit perfect signal to my receiver, will there then be no need to buy a separate soundcard?

 

[b0dhi]

Quote:

it is very good possibly the best yet (freeware) particularly when playing back wave files, here I found it excellent, not so sure about flac files however

I could understand if you were talking about formats like MP3, OGG, etc, since those can actually be decoded slightly differently by different decoders, and dithering may or may not be applied, thus these formats could conceivably sound very slightly different between players.

But when it comes to WAV there is no decoding. WAV files are not decompressed or decoded. There is no dithering performed on them by the player (or at least there shouldn't). Unless there's a DSP active, the audio data is not altered at all. The wave data in the file is simply passed from the file to the audio interface. The notion that Cplay, Foobar, Winamp or XM sound even one iota different when playing wav files is simply nonsense.

As for the bitperfect discussion, this page should clear up some misconceptions:
Bitperfect - cmediadrivers - Google Code - "Bitperfect" / "bit-exact" explained

 

[Mikeb]

In answer to the last post regarding playing wave files in Cplay, firstly have you tried this progam yourself, if not I think you are a bit premature with comments and you should try yourself using the program and make up your own mind up. I can remember when digital first hit the market a lot of the hifi press were saying that because the signal was digital all players and cd transports would sound the same, as we know ourselves this is certainly not the case. Also digital signals can be adversly affected by jitter and noise etc. As far as I am aware the CPlay software loads the music file/disc information directly into the computer ram and plays the music fom here, this is likely to reduce jitter and may explain why to my ears it sounds so good. Although technical matters are interesting I don't really care whether its bit perfect or not or what software or player is used for playback provided the music that I hear from the speakers or headphones I enjoy,and if a particular program appears to enhance this pleasure thats the program for me.

 

[b0dhi]

You've fallen for marketing nonsense. There is no such thing as playing music "directly" from RAM. All music player software stores the music in RAM, to some extent (not withstanding DMA technicalities). The only question is how much of the music it loads into RAM at once. You can make Winamp, for example, load the entire file into RAM easily by changing the "Full file buffering" setting. Even if you did that, though, it would still have zero effect on jitter, since the audio is buffered again in the soundcard.

What ignorant people said years ago about digital audio has nothing to do with the fact that WAV files played on any 2 music players should appear as absolutely identical audio data from the perspective of the soundcard.

You're entirely within your rights if you want to express your opinion that Cplay sounds better playing WAV files than another program. Just as I'm within my rights to say that that is impossible.

 

[LnxPrgr3]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mikeb /img/forum/go_quote.gif CPlay software loads the music file/disc information directly into the computer ram and plays the music fom here, this is likely to reduce jitter and may explain why to my ears it sounds so good.

• Any reasonable player will do this for small chunks of audio, and no reasonable player will load a large WAV file entirely into RAM before playing it -- it's waste of memory, and parts of it may end up in swap anyway, meaning you may still be loading parts of the song from the disk before playing them.
• The soundcard has its own internal buffer, and clocks its DAC itself, and changing the software you use won't change the jitter in that clock.

Failure to recognize digital audio's problems when it was new is no reason to treat it as a magical process now.

 

[ShadowVlican]

recently upgraded from XP to Vista and googled how to get bitperfect sound again

the WASAPI plugin for foobar works great with my Trends UD-10 (usb transport)

bitperfect confirmed through DTS wave files