Nazo
100+ Head-Fier
- Joined
- Aug 24, 2008
- Posts
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- 11
So this is kind of hard to explain. I'm not really audiophile enough to really be able to get into the exact specifics of it. It's really hard to explain, but it's like it has less detail in the sound or something of the sort. A while back I found I wasn't really enjoying my music as much as I used to but couldn't really say why. At first I sort of assumed it was my rigged up cheap setup and upgraded everything (I'd been meaning to do it anyway, so that much is ok.) No real change though. I set things up to use only my external DAC+AMP (before I was using optical out from as Asus Xonar DG2 so I'd have the supposed benefits in gaming -- but I don't really use all that extra fake processing anyway, so it didn't really make much difference in the end anyway -- while benefiting from an external DAC so now I switched to just USB straight to the DAC and took out the soundcard entirely. As I suspected, in the end there's just not much difference between 100% software and supposed hardware acceleration if you don't use sound processing effects...)
Then one day, just playing around, I connected my DAC an my Android phone. What I was missing was all there! Now, it's very important to point out here that I've disable the equalizer and I have NO external sound processing like Beats or that sort of crap. (I'm running a relatively clean CyanogenMod setup here. Not quite clear AOSP, but really close and as far as I know the only sound processing is that equalizer which, as I said, is turned off.) So in Windows I tried changing things around. I tried removing all resampling and just in case Windows was still doing some sort of processing I even switched to ASIO in my music player though I've never had tons of luck with ASIO in the past (doesn't play nice with other things, sound skips easily when I do things like loading webpages even though I have a modern multi-core CPU, etc etc.) I also tried the other options like WSAPI, but it's my understanding that ASIO completely bypasses all sound processing by Windows itself. This is with Foobar2000, though I've listened to other things via other players (such as music videos in Media Player Classic Home Cinema just for instance.) I also tried changing the Windows mixer to do 44.1KHz since most of my sources come from CD audio (I had it at 96KHz before figuring on a "highest common denominator" type of thing) but no change that my ears could detect anyway.
Now, thinking back I could ALMOST say that this all started back when I went from Windows XP to Windows 7. But I'm not sure. One thing I will be doing is trying Linux, though it isn't exactly known for ease of bit-accurate sound (I wanted to try to setup OSS as per some suggestions, but I can't seem to get the built-in OSS support to work right and if I try to install the official proprietary OSS it fails on the USB driver portion and then screws up everything such that I have no sound at all. I didn't know enough to figure out how to completely undo whatever it did either and had to actually reinstall.) I'll be doing more testing, but for now I've been feverish and stopped up with something or other and haven't really been able to listen to music very well. Still, I would swear it did seem better despite having to use ALSA. (I did disable the mixer in the ALSA plugin's settings in DeaDBeeF anyway.) If so, it's definitely something Windows is doing and maybe specific to 7 since I would just swear XP didn't do this.
Then one day, just playing around, I connected my DAC an my Android phone. What I was missing was all there! Now, it's very important to point out here that I've disable the equalizer and I have NO external sound processing like Beats or that sort of crap. (I'm running a relatively clean CyanogenMod setup here. Not quite clear AOSP, but really close and as far as I know the only sound processing is that equalizer which, as I said, is turned off.) So in Windows I tried changing things around. I tried removing all resampling and just in case Windows was still doing some sort of processing I even switched to ASIO in my music player though I've never had tons of luck with ASIO in the past (doesn't play nice with other things, sound skips easily when I do things like loading webpages even though I have a modern multi-core CPU, etc etc.) I also tried the other options like WSAPI, but it's my understanding that ASIO completely bypasses all sound processing by Windows itself. This is with Foobar2000, though I've listened to other things via other players (such as music videos in Media Player Classic Home Cinema just for instance.) I also tried changing the Windows mixer to do 44.1KHz since most of my sources come from CD audio (I had it at 96KHz before figuring on a "highest common denominator" type of thing) but no change that my ears could detect anyway.
Now, thinking back I could ALMOST say that this all started back when I went from Windows XP to Windows 7. But I'm not sure. One thing I will be doing is trying Linux, though it isn't exactly known for ease of bit-accurate sound (I wanted to try to setup OSS as per some suggestions, but I can't seem to get the built-in OSS support to work right and if I try to install the official proprietary OSS it fails on the USB driver portion and then screws up everything such that I have no sound at all. I didn't know enough to figure out how to completely undo whatever it did either and had to actually reinstall.) I'll be doing more testing, but for now I've been feverish and stopped up with something or other and haven't really been able to listen to music very well. Still, I would swear it did seem better despite having to use ALSA. (I did disable the mixer in the ALSA plugin's settings in DeaDBeeF anyway.) If so, it's definitely something Windows is doing and maybe specific to 7 since I would just swear XP didn't do this.