smodtactical
Headphoneus Supremus
- Joined
- Nov 11, 2012
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Your description of the difference sounds more like placebo than an actual difference in sound reproduction. Perhaps if you use criteria that refer to specific aspects of sound, like response, dynamics, distortion, etc. A controlled comparison test would be good too.
Ok I took a short segment of well mastered flac to analyze. You can listen too if you wish. Its the first 15 seconds of Nicholas Gunn - Earth story (sacred gun). When it starts out the Indian call sound and with the subsequent bell like sounds what I really notice is the clarity of the vibrating echos. Its just clearly more distinct, audible and separated from the 'whooshing' wind sound that comes in over top. This is made even more clear after the wind/whoosh passes and you just hear the exaggerated string sound being plucked sound... the echo is just so nice and clear in wasapi where in DS its there but smeared and not as clear. The layering is also somewhat collapsed in DS probably contributing to the smearing.
The whoosh sound also is more nuanced where you can hear internal detail of it in wasapi whereas in DS it just feels very monotonal and doesn't let you hear the underlying indian call sound.
At around 20-25 seconds when the drum comes in, in wasapi you can hear a double or triple sort of beat with each drum stroke quite distinctly where in DS it sounds again smeared almost like 1 weird sounding stroke instead.
Everything as I said just sounds slightly more separated and thus detail is more easily picked out. Almost like turning up the 'contrast' or increasing the dynamics of the sound slightly.