Nazo
2[H]4U
- Joined
- Apr 2, 2002
- Messages
- 3,672
For quite some time I've felt like something just didn't sound right with my Windows sound. Initially I determined it to be a fault of drivers I was using for the soundcard I had at the time (Asus DG which always had horrible drivers and a third party had offered improved modified drivers that were a bit of a hodgepodge -- to make things worse, simply removing them didn't help at the time, but when I did a clean reinstall of Windows it sounded much better versus before it,) but I'm now using a USB DAC with very minimal drivers and once again I find myself feeling like it just has something missing but not really being able to put my finger on it. Recently I setup a Raspberry Pi with a cheaper third party equivalent to the HiFiBerry DAC+. Suddenly I find that the sound coming out from it is just positively blowing me away for some of the same songs even. Somehow it just sounds clearer or something I can't quite pinpoint. (I do not have golden audiophile ears. I consider myself to be a baby audiophile as sound is terribly important but I don't go all out insane over it. Mostly.) I also tried a Fiio E18K since it can handle my HD650 headphones along with a different RPi and once again the sound just seems somehow not just clearer, but more natural and realistic even.
One thing I've been trying to figure out is there are various Windows sound methods, each of which people say sound different in various ways. But I'm having troubles really pinpointing. I would swear some like DirectSound do seem somehow softer and with almost a hint of a reverb or something, but I really can't even be sure. And how much of this is cognitive bias because I believe there is a possibility there is a difference and that the worse methods should sound worse? I need to test each of the output methods and figure out what is the best and I need to be relatively sure the result is accurate. Perhaps even with this I could better pinpoint whatever it is that seems to make such a difference. Perhaps even there is no difference and once again there is a cognitive bias (though it's odd because the USB DAC on my PC should be of a significantly higher quality than the generic HiFiBerry and bloody well had better be better than the Fiio E18K given the price difference.) I need to at least start narrowing all this down even if it's going to be hard to ever truly pinpoint even if it is simply bias. Another thing I'm trying to pinpoint is if it could somehow be Windows itself. As I said with the Asus DG hodgepodge drivers, uninstalling them did nothing, but when I later reinstalled Windows from scratch it suddenly sounded better. It leads me to wonder: what if it's something that happens over time or wasn't initially installed on the fresh Windows installation which gets installed later on? Anything I can do to help me narrow things down would be nice and this seems like a good place to start since I can't even right now specify exactly what I'm looking for.
Besides DirectSound and of course ASIO, I think I should test stuff like WASAPI though. Obviously Foobar2000 comes to mind as something with blindfold tests, but it tests input files, not output methods. My best guess is I need a console utility that can output via different methods (perhaps a Windows port of mplayer? I've never actually messed with it though and wouldn't have a clue how to make it do this though. As far as I know it doesn't support those more advanced sound output methods anyway) and to setup some sort of batch script. At the very minimum, if I could even manually write some simple script to test this back and forth on the fly instead of manually switching everything around back and forth it might still help some, though something random obviously would be better (well, it needs a way to actually test me though. Eg like how Foobar2000 asks you which is which and then grades your response based on which ones it actually played so you are much better able to know if you're just being biased or not.) I think all of this could be done via a script, but as many batch files as I've done over the years, I've never really messed with some of the stuff that I'd have to do for such a thing. (Mostly simple if statements, errorlevel checks on the old MS-DOS based choice.com, and etc. Very very little of the more advanced stuff the Windows console has added in its NT-based iterations like modern Windows versions.)
One thing I've been trying to figure out is there are various Windows sound methods, each of which people say sound different in various ways. But I'm having troubles really pinpointing. I would swear some like DirectSound do seem somehow softer and with almost a hint of a reverb or something, but I really can't even be sure. And how much of this is cognitive bias because I believe there is a possibility there is a difference and that the worse methods should sound worse? I need to test each of the output methods and figure out what is the best and I need to be relatively sure the result is accurate. Perhaps even with this I could better pinpoint whatever it is that seems to make such a difference. Perhaps even there is no difference and once again there is a cognitive bias (though it's odd because the USB DAC on my PC should be of a significantly higher quality than the generic HiFiBerry and bloody well had better be better than the Fiio E18K given the price difference.) I need to at least start narrowing all this down even if it's going to be hard to ever truly pinpoint even if it is simply bias. Another thing I'm trying to pinpoint is if it could somehow be Windows itself. As I said with the Asus DG hodgepodge drivers, uninstalling them did nothing, but when I later reinstalled Windows from scratch it suddenly sounded better. It leads me to wonder: what if it's something that happens over time or wasn't initially installed on the fresh Windows installation which gets installed later on? Anything I can do to help me narrow things down would be nice and this seems like a good place to start since I can't even right now specify exactly what I'm looking for.
Besides DirectSound and of course ASIO, I think I should test stuff like WASAPI though. Obviously Foobar2000 comes to mind as something with blindfold tests, but it tests input files, not output methods. My best guess is I need a console utility that can output via different methods (perhaps a Windows port of mplayer? I've never actually messed with it though and wouldn't have a clue how to make it do this though. As far as I know it doesn't support those more advanced sound output methods anyway) and to setup some sort of batch script. At the very minimum, if I could even manually write some simple script to test this back and forth on the fly instead of manually switching everything around back and forth it might still help some, though something random obviously would be better (well, it needs a way to actually test me though. Eg like how Foobar2000 asks you which is which and then grades your response based on which ones it actually played so you are much better able to know if you're just being biased or not.) I think all of this could be done via a script, but as many batch files as I've done over the years, I've never really messed with some of the stuff that I'd have to do for such a thing. (Mostly simple if statements, errorlevel checks on the old MS-DOS based choice.com, and etc. Very very little of the more advanced stuff the Windows console has added in its NT-based iterations like modern Windows versions.)