[chinnei]

I've searched all over the place trying to gather some information and I think I confused myself even more about the resampling and the whole issue about bypassing it with asio or kernel.

Right now, I am using asio and kernel plugin with winamp with revo7.1 and I absolutely love the sound output. If I understand correctly, by doing this, it prevents the sound from resampling to 48 but instead to 44.1, right? I've recently installed asio4all, and now all the sound coming out of my computer using spdif is 44.1 as according to my receiver. Is this normal?


If it is, what is the difference between, let's say, using windows media player vs. winamp if they all output to 44.1? Are they in same quality or is one better than the other? Correct me if I am wrong, but I thought that you can't use asio with wmp10.


Just to clarify, I am planning to use MCE2005 with my htpc and if I understand correctly, the default player is wmp10? If so, is there a reason why I can't ditch the entire winamp setup and use wmp10 with asio4all to achieve same sound quality with simplicity of MCE2005?


Please help!

 

[chinnei]

bump

 

[Rob]

Im curious about this too. So lets Bump it up.


Rob

 

[thomaspf]

Could you explain a bit what is it you are actually trying to do?


What do you connect the output of the Revo to? Are you using the analog or the digital output?


The Revo supports kernel streaming for bit perfect playback so if youuse a software player that supports kernel streaming you are done right there.


If you want to use a player that does not support kernel streaming but does support ASIO you can still use the standard Revo drivers unless you need ASIO on the digital output. In order to get bit perfect S/PDIF output on the Revo with ASIO you can use the ASIO4ALL shim which exposes another ASIO driver that in turn speakes to the kernel streaming interfaces.


What happens when you play your music in MCE. Does it actually sound any different to you? If not, I would forget about all these complexities and be happy with that.


Cheers


Thomas

 

[chinnei]

Wow, I thought the thread was buried in deep, thanks for the bump and your reply.

Quote:

What do you connect the output of the Revo to? Are you using the analog or the digital output?

Sorry, it's digital.

Quote:

What happens when you play your music in MCE. Does it actually sound any different to you? If not, I would forget about all these complexities and be happy with that.

See, that's exactly it. I can't really tell the difference, so I was just trying figure out why should there be a difference if they are all passed through spdif?

Quote:

In order to get bit perfect S/PDIF output on the Revo with ASIO you can use the ASIO4ALL shim which exposes another ASIO driver that in turn speakes to the kernel streaming interfaces.

So, since using asio or kernel through spdif produces a bit perfect output, what exactly is happening in media player that prevents the bit perfect playback, but still shows up as 44.1hz on my receiver? Does it mean media player somehow mangles with the sound?


Again, I am not complaining about the sound, I am just confused about this whole thing and trying to clear myself up.


thanks.

 

[thomaspf]

Media player allows you to add equalization and other effects to your sound but you can also disable all the filter and just pass the bits through unmodified.


At that point it comes to the interplay between the audio stack, the sound card driver, and the actual sound card hardware what happens to the bits before they go out via S/PDIF.


If there is no difference in sound to whatever you compare it against I would just enjoy the music.


Cheers


Thomas

 

[darklordjames]

almost. the difference is volume.


if you take a DTS-CD track and play it in ASIO mode in Winamp, out to a reciever, you will get excellent sounding music. playing the same track on WMP10 will result in noise.


see, there are several areas of volume adjustment in a Windows environment, and the short of it is that the max available volume using a non-ASIO/KS playback is like 99.9%. this mangles DTS-CD, and it mangles CD-Audio, even though you have bypassed the resampling problem.


just like Thomas said though - if it sounds good to you, then run with it. the niceness of moving to MCCE2005 may be worth it, even though you know that you are sacrificing a bit in audio.

 

[Scotty L]

doh

 

[darklordjames]

doh?

 

[Spoonfed]

darkloardjames,


interesting, that what a MS worker also told me.


Just to "add" the Revo does not resample to 48 like the Augedy 2 (sp) as example. The resample this card does is more noticable and worse than what the "kmixer" (ie no asio) windows XP/2000 does to the sound.


If you don't hear it don't worry, its fairly suttle, really i find i can only notice in the reduction of "ambiance" in the music.

 

[chinnei]

Okay, that clears it up for me. Thank you all.

Quote:

Originally posted by Spoonfed Just to "add" the Revo does not resample to 48 like the Augedy 2 (sp) as example. The resample this card does is more noticable and worse than what the "kmixer" (ie no asio) windows XP/2000 does to the sound.

Spoonfed, is that resampling true even you pass digital through audigy? If it is, well I have audigy2 in my other machine but I didn't realize that because I only use it for gaming, therefore analog. Just curious, what's the point of those cards resampling even in digital? I mean, isn't that kind of defeats the purpose of passing the signal so that it can be processed externally?

 

[Spoonfed]

yes all PCM is resampled to 48 on the SPDIF of these cards.


DD/DTS are still passed as far as i am aware, though these are usually 48 "native" anyways.