Intel High Definition Audio and Vista?

[djt]

I’m about to install Vista on a spare drive in my D975XBX2 based machine.

I currently have an X-Fi sound card in this machine and was thinking of removing it for Vista after reading about the Creative/Vista mess. I have noticed a lot of posts from people that are actually going back to their on-board sound because of this.

Intel has had a Vista audio driver listed since 12/06. I do not know a lot about Intel’s High Definition Audio and was wondering if those of us who own the Bad Axe 2 are better off than say some one who has a motherboard with Realtek on-board sound?

How would the on-board audio on the D975XBX2 compare to an X-Fi?

[SpeedDMN]

Creative claimed a while back that they would have a final driver for Vista by the release, but just having gone to thier site they still have the one from December listed so I don't know. I would probably try both solutions to see which is better the way it is now. Not hard to switch back and forth.

[k0NG0]

Search the forums, there is a thread on the sound quality of the on-board BadAxe/2 compared to cards like the X-Fi.

[S.SubZero]

The "mess" with Vista isn't about Creative, it's about hardware accelerated sound and Vista's HAL dropping support for it. This won't make CL cards stop working, it simply stops the hardware accelerated sound from working. Creative has an OpenAL wrapper sort of thing they are working on to get around it. The card otherwise should work fine, and Creative has had beta drivers up for a while.

What other sound card makers use hardware accelerated sound? Are they not having any problems?

[djt]

The "mess" with Vista isn't about Creative

Yes, I know about the audio stack rewrite with Vista. I also know that it is not totally Creative’s fault, and then again Creative does not have a stellar reputation when it comes to drivers either.

My question is that if all of the functions of Intel’s High Definition Audio are working with Vista properly, why bother with using the X-Fi?

As long as the on-board audio is not causing that much of a CPU hit I’m willing to give up a few features such as EAX.

[S.SubZero]

Originally Posted by djt

Yes, I know about the audio stack rewrite with Vista. I also know that it is not totally Creative’s fault, and then again Creative does not have a stellar reputation when it comes to drivers either.

I wouldn't know anything about this. I've had a CL Audigy 1 since they came out, and it's never given me any problems. The drivers have always worked, and always did what they claimed to do. The bare drivers are not memory hogs and don't glitch or anything.

Originally Posted by djt

As long as the on-board audio is not causing that much of a CPU hit I’m willing to give up a few features such as EAX.

Since I can't find any hard numbers on CPU utilization on the Intel boards, who knows..? I just ordered up a new system over the last few days, and I originally planned to go with onboard audio, but at the last second I decided to get an X-Fi Xtreme Gamer.

[hrowster]

It's unbelievable that Microsoft would dump the HAL layer for sound cards because doing so kills all the advanced features of the cards. The real problem comes with home recording -- ALL the controls, such as volume mixer, reverb, panning, graphic equalizer, noise removal, EAX effects, stereo tweaks, multiple inputs, and anything else you can think of that makes home recording possible and effective -- well, they're gone and you can no longer use them. In other words, you might as well make your recordings on an old tape cassette recorder.

I have a home recording studio that's usually pretty busy, but now it's dead, dead and gone, and all my expensive hardware is now mostly useless. I upgraded to Vista, got the driver for my Audigy 4 Pro sound card, was even getting ready to upgrade to an X-Fi card, when I discovered that the whole range of audio controls was no longer there, and will also no longer be there in the X-Fi card. When I called Creative tech support they informed me, with bitterness, irony, and some weeping, that Microsoft has removed the Hardware Abstraction Layer for advanced sound and has left us all in the dark - darkness and silence. All advanced sound cards have suffered a similar fate, and many video cards too, so everyone who shelled out the money for advanced hardware has been effectively told by Microsoft, "Too bad."

As I said, it's unbelievable. I have had to reinstall Windows XP in a dual-boot configuration so I can use my sound studio again, and am still trying to get everything to work right. Reinstalling Windows XP after installing Windows Vista caused horrible and terrifying disk error problems with conflicting partitions, which took me an entire day to fix, made ten times more difficult because Microsoft has tightened up the controls so severely on how you can install and upgrade the Vista OS. All of this is cold-blooded murder, and all of it relates to the well known tendency of Microsoft to go for the buck whenever possible (and they probably have enough bucks already).

What a mess.

[deg]

Ok, this thread is just turned into a mess and I wonder if I could dispell some of the non-sense. First of all, Microsoft did not do away with the HAL. They did away with kmixer.sys. There is still a kernel interface to the sound system. It is radically different. It took them quite sometime to decide on what to do about it.

Most of this was motivated by the fact that the original philosopy behind kmixer and the audio subsystem API's beneath it were terribly aged and based on 10w speakers with little or no fidelity. It does not allow for total control of your audio streams. In fact, most professional level audio cards used a sound API interface into the NT kernel that bypasses kmixer. The reason this is needed is the fidelity of the sound from kmixer tended to be pretty ugly, even with decent drivers.

The worst problem with kmixer is the difference in what goes in and what comes out. For example, CDs are 16 bit 44khz. Native kmixer doesn't support that format. It supports 16 bit 48khz. No problem, we just convert it to 48khz... PROBLEM. Your CDs are no longer bit perfect. If you look at a frequency analysis of the waveform, you can see a dramatic decrease in overall sound quality when any kmixer digital conversion occurs. So in theory if you have a 16 bit, 48khz signal, kmixer wouldn't have to touch the bits and at least that would come out bit perfect. Still a PROBLEM. How do you let other sound events come into the sound stream while another stream is playing? You convert it into one single signal. So your watching a DVD and you instant messenger pops up and run a wav file. Kmixer takes all current sound signals and converts them to 16 bit 48khz streams and then remixes those into one. Very ugly.

The new API's in Vista are much more sophisticated. They are geared towards getting better fidelity out of the system and not messing with the signal anywhere they dont have to. They also added two new abilities to the API that audiophiles and sound engineers have been asking for and can still appease digital content providers. You can now have an application use the current APIs and go into exclusive mode. So no other sounds force and ugly distortion causing, fidelity lossy, nappy headed stream remix.


There are plenty of threads in the audiophile and home theater home enthusiast forums that explain this. It is much easier to just complain than research extensively. Micorosoft also did not remove the abiity to add an external audio interface to the OS. They just did not write it for other companies. Creative and many software companies have actually used the ASIO interface for pro sound. Steinberg pioneered the technology many years ago in order to make the most out their sound mixing software and it was a welcome addition to the tools already available.

So the bottom line is this, it is much more possible to get the sound out of your computer in the way it was intended to come sound with Vista. In fact, many of the current HiDef audio chips have several stream processors on board. This way you can rely on your audio card manufacturer's drivers to stream the audio and not kmixer.

With a Realtek audio on board that ships with many of todays systems, you can have bit perfect digital sound (PCM or DD/DTS) come straight out of the SPDIF interface into your high end home theater receiver and not drop a bit. When you look at what they did, it truly is a quantum leap in sound advancement.

Nothing is perfect, but I have a pretty serious home theater and never really gave it much credibility when the audiophiles complained about their streams not being bit perfect. With Vista on my home theater PC, my jaw hit the floor. The difference is massive. The analysis that I have seen show kmixer intoducing as much as 10% THD on the first conversion alone. Not to mention jitter, dynamic range loss and overall EMI issues.

Please do embrace the new technology. It is your friend. While most onboard audio solutions do have a rather high signal to noise ratio, it is still usually not audable. And comparing that to the loss caused by multiple DAC and ADC conversions and remixes from kmixer, I have no trouble giving up EAX for the major increase in frequency response and overall signal quality.

Creative is just ****** that MS is not writing most of the code that they should have been writing in the first place. All those specs of 110dB noise floors and low signal to noise are worthless if you have a 25+% overall signal degradation just getting to that fancy new sound card.

Go to the AVSforums and look at that really long thread where the VP of audio APIs at MS is asking for and listening to, what they can do to make the sound subsystem in Vista better and their customers happier.

Enjoy!

[FightingChance]

Awesome! Thanks for the clarification Deg, I saw this thread and knew there were some facts being thrown around that just weren't true.

It is very interesting how, among all things PC, such as video and overclocking and RAM and such, that audio seems to be the most misunderstood.

[zapionics<alt>]

Originally Posted by FightingChance

...It is very interesting how, among all things PC, such as video and overclocking and RAM and such, that audio seems to be the most misunderstood.

Am I the only one who thinks audio is extremely complex?
Hey I know how a speaker works, voltage, cone vibrates, particles jump, sound comes out, but the rest of it is just plain incomprehensible...

[FightingChance]

Well, audio is extremely complex, when you get down to the very nitty gritty.

Something that makes it very murky is that experience and sensation can change very drastically from one person to the next. With video, usually it's pretty apparent when the picture is good or not.

[zapionics<alt>]

Originally Posted by FightingChance

...Something that makes it very murky is that experience and sensation can change very drastically from one person to the next. ...

Its not that, its all the techno babble and complex science, the language has its own soul and trying to find a way in is really hard for noobs like me.

The only thing hard about video is analogue television incoding systems and the odd quirks that came up with those, but all thats pretty much old and forgotten now that we have digital.

[deg]

To answer the question that started the thread, I prefer the RealTek to the Sigmatel at the moment. RealTek, believe it or not has worked very hard to produce a driver that auto detects the current bit stream depth on the fly. No one else has been able to do this yet. My high end pro audio card, requires a manual change to the current bit stream depth. It, of course, has no Vista drivers yet.

I find the Sigmatel drivers often cause issues in games and do not support as many formats.... yet. In fact, the drivers that ship with Vista work much better for me than the Sigmatel WHQL drivers. After having several games not produce any sound at all, I was confused. After further examination, I found that the Sigmatel drivers force the SPDIF to 44.1/16 by default. Sounds good until you want to run 48/96 x 16 bit. Those formats are not even in the menu! Remove Sigmatel drivers and let the Vista HD audio drivers redetect... voila, 16 bit 44.1/48/96/192 AND 24 bit 44.1/48/96/192 are all available. A quick switch to 16/48 and games run well. Of course, I am assuming they intend to auto detect original bit rate and frequency soon.

I just love how there are so many things that just work in Vista out of the box. Can't say that about XP anymore can you? Don't get me wrong, I dual boot in case something doesn't work in Vista. But so far, the only real issue has been pro-audio ASIO apps. Gotta have my Cubase with ASIO. 50ms latency when recording is way too noticeable. Throws the talent for a loop. You can still mix with the Vista HAL through DX though. That seems to work well.

[jhaymore]

Deg,
I recently purchased the D975XBX2 motherboard and installed Vista Ultimate. The machine primarily runs media center. I installed the sigmatel drivers that intel have on their site. I am using the spdif (optical) running out into a Logitech Z-5500 receiver. It seems like on mce2005 on intel 915g chipset I just installed the audio driver and in the software set the output to dolby digital. The receiver always showed Dolby Digital, and didn't change. If I played music it came out as stereo, and if I played a movie, etc it came out surround, but always showing Dolby Digital.

With Vista and the new motherboard the sound plays back, but it doesn't say "Dolby Digital" on the receiver anymore, and regardless of what is playing I can change the receiver between stereo, stereo x2, Dolby music, or Dolby movie. It seems like how it was working under mce2005 is the correct way? If so, how do I make Vista output the audio the same way?

[S.SubZero]

Originally Posted by deg

Ok, this thread is just turned into a mess and I wonder if I could dispell some of the non-sense. First of all, Microsoft did not do away with the HAL. They did away with kmixer.sys. There is still a kernel interface to the sound system. It is radically different. It took them quite sometime to decide on what to do about it.

You'd better relay this information to Creative Labs then, as they seem to think differently.

http://preview.creativelabs.com/alchemy/default.aspx

Originally Posted by CreativeLabs

In Windows Vista, Microsoft has decided to remove the Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) for DirectSound and DirectSound3D.