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Output to a DAC using Foobar+ASIO

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nosh:
kmixer apparently plays spoilsport. Shouldn't worry those who've moved past XP.

f0dder:
From that site:
The downside to this? If there are errors on the CD, you will hear them as there is not any correction being made to overcome the error.
--- End quote ---
Like, HUH?! - this seems to imply that it's the sound drivers, rather than the cd firmware, doing the error correction? That sounds pretty wrong to me.

OTOH, the post might be right about the default sound mixer (do realize the post date, though, algorithm might have been improved since 2004... somebody should look into this), but even if that's true, wouldn't that only happen when multiple sound streams are played back? Or is it enough to have adjusted the volume control?

nosh:
Hopefully, this article is more credible.

http://code.google.com/p/cmediadrivers/wiki/Bitperfect

Contrary to popular belief, the kmixer of Windows 2000 and XP doesn't modify the sound and is thus bitperfect if these four conditions are met:

   1. The PCM/wave volume slider of the mixer (sndvol32.exe) must be set at its maximum. Some start-up applications modify the volume slider (e.g. hardware monitoring tools from Asus).
   2. The player must be compiled for the same architecture that the OS was compiled for - e.g. 32 bit player on a 32 bit OS, 64 bit player on a 64 bit OS. This is the case for the vast majority of installations because the 64 bit version of Windows XP isn't very commonly used.
   3. Applications other than the player mustn't play sounds, otherwise the two output streams will be potentially sample rate converted and mixed.
   4. Applications which are using the soundcard for recording have to use the same sample rate as concurrently running applications which are playing sounds - the soundcard has only one clock generator and hence this limitation arises.
--- End quote ---

f0dder:
Goodie, nosh - that makes a helluvalotta sense :)

nosh:
Yeah and they're easy to implement rules, so I'm skipping ASIO altogether and going with DirectSound. Played a Test CD yesterday, couldn't tell any difference between ASIO and DS.

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