Windows Sound Quality Seems Better Then Windows 7

Discussion in 'Windows 8' started by JustNicky, Aug 11, 2012.

  1. JustNicky

    JustNicky MDL Novice

    Aug 8, 2012
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    Anybody Noticed ? Windows 8 Sound Quality Seem a lot better then Windows 7 plus i'm running a Sound Blaster X-FI Titanium Sound Card ?

    All i can say it wow this seem louder :party_time: Also on my amp early on say Windows 7 i would need to put the volume for anything decent around 30% now with just 40% nearly blowing my ear drums also set up is 5.1 Pioneer Speakers with Yamaha amp also would have to say the best app for this Windows 8 has to be Misery of Sound :robot:
     
  2. Helmutcheese

    Helmutcheese MDL Member

    Jul 29, 2009
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    Hardware Acceleration for sound is back in Win 8 as it was gone from Vista/Win7.

    No doubt new soundcards will come out to once again fully support.
     
  3. jayblok

    jayblok MDL Guru

    Dec 26, 2010
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    Hell yea,I thought I was the only one noticing this,yess
     
  4. Rand

    Rand MDL Novice

    Dec 7, 2007
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    Hardware offloading of sound is only available in Metro applications, it's disabled and routed through software on the desktop.
    This shouldn't impact sound quality in any way however.
     
  5. Helmutcheese

    Helmutcheese MDL Member

    Jul 29, 2009
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    I only know what I read same as others when Win 8 was getting spec'd.

    I see no point in disabling it in desktop use as that is where you want proper sound not in metro s**t.

    I have no proper Creative X-FI drivers for Win 8 yet to see and not sure if there will be a " tick/check box" for Hardware Acceleration like XP etc.
     
  6. JustNicky

    JustNicky MDL Novice

    Aug 8, 2012
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    #6 JustNicky, Aug 12, 2012
    Last edited by a moderator: Apr 20, 2017
    (OP)
  7. Helmutcheese

    Helmutcheese MDL Member

    Jul 29, 2009
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    Does it work 100% for my X-FI Titanium as the PAX drivers need Windows driver signing disabled at EVERY restart or all settings you set up are reset to default.

    He thinks Creative need to update something to prevent "Entertaiment Centre" losing setting each restart.

    I have a basic driver that came with Win 8 RTM.
     
  8. JustNicky

    JustNicky MDL Novice

    Aug 8, 2012
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    Oh mine be fine really nothing being resting tried installing the first one and let update do the other one maybe that will work :confused:
     
  9. Rand

    Rand MDL Novice

    Dec 7, 2007
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    msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/br259116.aspx

    MS covers it here, it is indeed disabled completely unless you're in Metro. Metro needs apps designed specifically for hardware audio to use it.
    For reasoning, I'd imagine any additional features they can add to Metro and lock out on the desktop is reason enough. Metro is hugely advantageous financially for them, so they have a vested interest in ensuring Metro has a privileged status relative to the desktop.

    Beyond that, Metro is where ARM devices will lie. And they need all the performance they can possibly get... whereas modern x86 hardware is vastly more powerful.
     
  10. Helmutcheese

    Helmutcheese MDL Member

    Jul 29, 2009
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    Still a joke as some of the finding I had from earlier did not state it would be Metro only.

    Metro for desktop users is mostly s**t (fine for tablet/phones), and does not matter if we have powerful CPU's or dedicated soundcards or not, hardware sound is better than software sound.

    Just a pity many peeps will buy Win 8 not knowing its s**t for desktops so MS can count that as a sale.
     
  11. Sugadevan

    Sugadevan MDL Junior Member

    Feb 20, 2011
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    Im using win8 in my desktop, im enjoying more :yeahyeah: if u don't like win8 in desktops, then its simple, don't use it :) many peeps?? haha don't abuse :)
     
  12. Stannieman

    Stannieman MDL Guru

    Sep 4, 2009
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    How about dj-software and stuff like ableton and FL studio, professional audio mixing software for in producing studios etc.
    I can imagine that hardware accelerate sound is preferred then. Isn't latency lower when hardware acceleration is used?
     
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  13. HumansCan'tBeTrusted

    Aug 7, 2012
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    I used FL Studio on Windows 8 and yes. Sound quality is better so it's better to work with simillar software on Windows 8.
     
  14. Berny

    Berny MDL Member

    Jul 29, 2009
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    Hardware sound is in no way better than software sound quality-wise, it's the components on the soundcard or additional software filters of the manufacturer (like the creative crystallizer) that make the difference: doing the calculations on a chip or doing them in the main cpu changes nothing regarding quality.

    I'd take a 1-2% CPU performance loss any day over terrible kernel drivers that kept forcing me to reboot every few days like the Soundblaster Live! ones. Has everybody forgotten how terrible the audio drivers were in the early 2000s? If it wasn't for windows switching to universal drivers (UAA) on the last XP-years and vista going software-drivers only we'd still be forced to upgrade audio card every few years or live with crashes. Remember how Creative only supported each card for 1-2 years max despite the driver being always the same? There were always unofficial drivers supporting all their older hardware until they sued the guy that released them to death.

    The "accelerated audio" of windows 8 is basically just for the tablets, because ARM processors often include dedicated hardware to play AAC/MP3 streams without taxing the very slow CPU core, reason why the feature has been tied to metro apps. Games have to do all sort of positional audio processing and a simple mp3 stream playback would be completely useless: Windows 8 didn't restore the original hardware acceleration, they just added some lame accelerated playback capabilities for music and video playback.
     
  15. PaulDesmond

    PaulDesmond MDL Magnet

    Aug 6, 2009
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    I agree and I only can say, that my sound card RME Digi 96, a professional one, shows no difference at all when mounted to an XP, W7 or now an 8 machine. The drivers come from the manufacturer and this is the point. Same hardware and same driver software = same sound imao
     
  16. Helmutcheese

    Helmutcheese MDL Member

    Jul 29, 2009
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    Beside the point, the choice was there to check a box or not for hardware sound, and there is plenty of posts out there showing MS messed up the doing so in Win 7 which BTW is not the holy grail.

    Each new OS has more ripped out it but some will defend it no matter how crap it becomes.
     
  17. Berny

    Berny MDL Member

    Jul 29, 2009
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    And some are never happy and will keep talking like they always know better. No matter what Microsoft, Apple or Linux companies do there will be somebody shouting "I LIEKED HOW IT WAS BEFORE. NEW OS IS TEH SUCKS! DEMOMAN IS SPY!!!". Microsoft like the other operating system companies builds operating systems for the masses, not tailored for every single user. If the terrible kernel audio drivers released by soundcard manufacturers kept causing crashes and tarnishing Microsoft's operating system reputation for a risible performance improvement they had all the right to disallow it. Would making it optional make things better? No, because the soundcard manufacturers would only have to support very few users and would invest even less money for bugfixing their disastrous kernel drivers.

    Moving to software processing had several advantages: once your soundcard is HD audio (most since 2004-2005) you don't need manufacturer drivers that often don't support newer OSes forcing you to buy new cards, you can have per-application volume control, you can have echo cancellation, volume normalization, background noise cancellation and other features you previously needed a dedicated card for. You should be thankful you don't need to buy a 200$ EAX card to have multichannel audio in newer games, not angry because you lost 1-2% of your framerate.
     
  18. Helmutcheese

    Helmutcheese MDL Member

    Jul 29, 2009
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    This is a enthusiasts forum where peeps can have an option be it good or bad, but some others here do not seem to accept that.

    Win 8 is not getting many good reviews even from big game dev's.

    Again leaving something as it is with a check box for those of you that do not want/care for hardware sound acceleration would have been suffice.

    Not exactly asking for 1st born or blood is it?

    I have came to the conclusion since Win 7 some peeps can not use their PC's for much as they would come across the shortfalls and missing old basic features+bugs still there now in Win 8.

    Surfing peon and hanging on forums all day probably will not show those up. ;)
     
  19. Berny

    Berny MDL Member

    Jul 29, 2009
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    I didn't deny your opinions, I only replied to your statement that hardware audio is better than software audio that you posed as a fact. As I have written hardware audio doesn't have only advantages, it also has huge drawbacks.

    No, but the hardware acceleration in windows 8 is not the hardware acceleration you were using in XP, it's just some extremely limited music playback that saves power on tablets. On XP the audio drivers could offload all the processing (crystallizer, equalizer, positional audio, whatever they wanted) on the hardware while on Windows 8 you can only offload MP3/AAC audio decoding on the hardware in a way that would be completely unusable for games or most applications because the audio file is played directly without going through the whole audio stack (so, for example if your soundblaster has a crystallizer filter or volume normalization it wouldn't work).

    The reason why they call it hardware offloading is because it basically uses your audio hardware directly as a cheap mp3/aac player to save power but you lose all your other audio filters/settings, a compromise people would want on tablet but certainly not on desktops and notebooks hence the reason they only limited it to metro.
     
  20. HALIKUS

    HALIKUS MDL Addicted

    Jul 29, 2009
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    #20 HALIKUS, Aug 12, 2012
    Last edited: Aug 12, 2012
    Hi Helmutcheese. Do you find it strange we both joined this site on the same day? :) It must of been the day Win7 RTM'ed or was leaked.


    This thread is interesting, i hadn't noticed sound differences because i stopped using my OS for music playback in lei of a media streaming device long ago. Would people say the sound on Laptops has improved, or at least gotten louder? I haven't used Win8 on a lappy yet but with Win7 i noticed the sound was usually quite quiet and i had become accustomed to lugging around portable speakers when listening to music outside.