Simultaneous playback devices in Vista x64?

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walkman

Limp Gawd
Joined
Nov 20, 2008
Messages
267
Is there a way to have two playback devices (speaker & spdif) output at the same time so I can easily change from speakers to headphones?

Or do I have to manually change the default playback device and restart the program playing audio?

I have a SupremeFX riser card that has an optical output that I use to connect to my pioneer TRE-D800 headphone base unit. I also have speakers connected to the riser card.
 
MS has taken great pride in the way sound works in Vista, and now especially in W7, but it still cant do what i want it to do.
 
Thanks odin75 for the link.

With all the driver issues around sound cards, I'd be hesitant to run two sound cards. Maybe it wouldn't be a problem if they were the same brand and shared the same drivers.

I guess I still don't understand why Vista won't output the sound via more than one playback device at a time. MS shows both devices as 'working', so why aren't they?
 
DRM/HDCP. It's stupid, but that's what it amounts to. If they allowed multiple outputs from the same card it would require dual-processing if one were hdmi and the analogue or even optical. The other alternative would be that they'd have to not drop down the audio on BR to crap-bitrate and allow it to be played back over "unprotected" audio paths, which Sony will never let them do.
 
walkman said:
Thanks odin75 for the link.

With all the driver issues around sound cards, I'd be hesitant to run two sound cards. Maybe it wouldn't be a problem if they were the same brand and shared the same drivers.

I guess I still don't understand why Vista won't output the sound via more than one playback device at a time. MS shows both devices as 'working', so why aren't they?
Click to expand...
Actually, there is no driver issues for me. I use 2 sound cards myself. One is the X-Fi XtremeMusic, and the other is the RealTeck onboard sound. I use them both at the same time, normally the onboard for all my Ventrilo voice chat, and the X-Fi while gaming in 5.1. There is no problem at all, so don't think the drivers are gonna mess with it.

As far as not allowing you to divide the work load given the amount of inputs they give you, I think this is actually a sound card problem, and the driver support it provides, rather than a protection method. As I understand it, protection only applies to protected HD video (HDCP) in 1080p, and HD sound (PAP) higher than 24-bit/96khz. And is not that they won't work, but they will actually resize and resample your video and audio respectively, instead of actually not allowing you to use it at all. So yeah, I don't think protection is the issue here, they're different things, but the actual hardware and their driver support.
 
That's sort of what I was saying. For protected content it would mean they'd have to run it through once for the protected output and once for the downsampled, unprotected which would mean double-load on the sound card. Sorry if I wasn't clearer about that. It's in contrast to the possibility where they say screw this and let it output the same lossless signal over an unprotected stream as long as it could handle the bandwidth.
 
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