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Topic: How exactly Does Windows 7 Audio Work? (Read 1647 times) previous topic - next topic
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How exactly Does Windows 7 Audio Work?

I just put a Fiio K5 inbetwen my computer and both my headphones and speakers. What this has made me realize is that I have never used my computer directly with headphones before. I have an internal X-FI Titanium Fatal1ty Pro and it has an obscene noise floor that isn't really audible with speakers that I have used but makes headphones unusable at very reasonable volumes.

Fortunately I have a couple of older Fiio AMP/DACs and a line-out adapter which means that I don't neccesarily have to buy a new sound card. However, one of the few times I used an X3II as a DAC I attempted to use famitracker and sample playback was stuttery to the point of unusableness. I really don't want to buy a new sound card, I just spend a bunch of money on headphones and amps. I was wondering if anybody had a plasuble explanation for what was going on and if I am likely to encunter problems with the other DACs. I did some reading on the audio framework in Windows but the impression I got is that this should not have been possible so I clearly have not understood something.

I play a wide variety of games and do some A/V editing most of which is through Audacity. I also use make games in Unity extensively.

Thanks!

Re: How exactly Does Windows 7 Audio Work?

Reply #1 –
Quote from: nintendoeats on
Fortunately I have a couple of older Fiio AMP/DACs and a line-out adapter which means that I don't neccesarily have to buy a new sound card. However, one of the few times I used an X3II as a DAC I attempted to use famitracker and sample playback was stuttery to the point of unusableness. I really don't want to buy a new sound card, I just spend a bunch of money on headphones and amps.

Your sound card has nothing to do with decoding audio.  And if you are using an external DAC, you don't even need it. 

If you're getting stuttering, it's probably just a problem with the program you're using for decoding or how you've configured it.

Re: How exactly Does Windows 7 Audio Work?

Reply #2 –
IIRC, there were stuttering issues with Creative (X-Fi) sound cards on SLI setups. Dunno if they ever got this fixed.

Maybe you should start by checking if the system is suitable for processing real-time audio and other tasks. Here's a tool for this test: http://www.resplendence.com/latencymon

Re: How exactly Does Windows 7 Audio Work?

Reply #3 –
Quote from: saratoga on
If you're getting stuttering, it's probably just a problem with the program you're using for decoding or how you've configured it.

This si what I thought. However, Famitracker worked fine using just the built-in card.