Ending the Windows Audio Quality Debate

[Sokel]

@edechamps you're right about volume control, I forgot some DACs have a hardware volume control. My understanding from the past (it could be outdated) that most affordable DACs (under $1k) have either no hardware volume volume control or they are some low quality Chinese stuff. If you want both quality and hardware volume we are talking $1000s. I have a very modest Schiit Bifrost, it has kinda good enough quality but no features. Even Yggdrasil that costs $2300 well outside of my price range still no hardware volume control. Sure some $5k DACs must have it.
About jitter, again you are right, the DACs outside of my price range have input buffering and reclocking so they don't care about jitter. The same $2300 Yggdrasil does it, but my very modest Bifrost 64 cannot. You throw ****** USB on the input, it gives you ****** music on the out. If I simply replug USB from my special USB card into regular USB slot it is audible, same way as downgrading from HD to CD is audible. A dedicated PC + $25 card is much cheaper than $2000+ DAC or $3000+ Tidal streamer. Sorry let's be real about affordability.

My question about Equalizer APO was, it seems to mess with software drivers if I try it. If I don't like it, can I switch back into exclusive mode? I am scared that once it changes something in my settings it may prevent me from using the exclusive mode again and I will have to reinstall Windows... Windows like it is without Equalizer APO and exclusive mode off sounds really bad. Indeed the title post of this thread was right, Windows drivers whatever they are I don't know in my case substantially degrade the sound quality.

Hardware VC through apps has nothing to do with price,origin or age.
It's only about implementation.
E-MU 0204 (as cheap and old as it gets) has it for example,I have it right here testing it right now.

So just ask the manufacturer if you need it,some have it,some don't.

 

[danadam]

About jitter, again you are right, the DACs outside of my price range have input buffering and reclocking so they don't care about jitter.

I'm pretty sure he didn't have only expensive DACs in mind.

 

[dedobot]

To me , checking "disable all sound effects " looks resets windows audio subsystem , including EAPO traces . That's on Win7.

 

[edechamps]

you're right about volume control, I forgot some DACs have a hardware volume control. My understanding from the past (it could be outdated) that most affordable DACs (under $1k) have either no hardware volume volume control or they are some low quality Chinese stuff. If you want both quality and hardware volume we are talking $1000s. I have a very modest Schiit Bifrost, it has kinda good enough quality but no features. Even Yggdrasil that costs $2300 well outside of my price range still no hardware volume control. Sure some $5k DACs must have it.

That's not true. Even very cheap USB DACs have hardware volume control. Note this doesn't mean it has some kind of fancy analog gain control or whatnot. It just means that the device has volume control capability exposed to the host, regardless of how it's implemented in the device. The volume control may still be ultimately digital, but inside the chip/device instead of being done by Windows.

Out of the dozen USB DACs I have (most of which are cheap stuff, some are really dirt cheap stuff), I don't think I saw even one that would cause Windows to fall back to software volume control. Pretty sure (almost) all of them advertise hardware volume control on their USB descriptors.

About jitter, again you are right, the DACs outside of my price range have input buffering and reclocking so they don't care about jitter. The same $2300 Yggdrasil does it, but my very modest Bifrost 64 cannot. You throw ****** USB on the input, it gives you ****** music on the out. If I simply replug USB from my special USB card into regular USB slot it is audible, same way as downgrading from HD to CD is audible. A dedicated PC + $25 card is much cheaper than $2000+ DAC or $3000+ Tidal streamer. Sorry let's be real about affordability.

Again this is nonsense. I'm willing to bet whatever amount of money that no-one is able to hear jitter on a $10 Apple DAC dongle. If you hear differences between different USB outputs, it is either some kind of electrical interaction causing noise (typically, a ground loop), or it's in your head. Given that you write things like "downgrading from HD to CD is audible" I am willing to bet it is the latter.

My question about Equalizer APO was, it seems to mess with software drivers if I try it. If I don't like it, can I switch back into exclusive mode? I am scared that once it changes something in my settings it may prevent me from using the exclusive mode again

Equalizer APO will not prevent you from using exclusive mode.

and I will have to reinstall Windows

If you're having issues with a third-party APO such as Equalizer APO, you can reset everything by simply reinstalling the audio driver. There is no need to go to extremes like this.

 

[Andro]

It is extremely unlikely that the DAC uses floating-point at all. 24-bit or 32-bit integer makes no practical difference since nothing can resolve more than about 21 bits anyway.

I was playing with the different settings and indeed the rate 24 bit / 96 khz suggested in the 1st post is the best. Lower than that and the software errors injected by the Equalizer math are audible. Higher than that and something in the chain just doesn't keep up with that much of data. The extreme settings are clearly distorted.

 

[Andro]

Yes, that's a fundamental difference between floating point and integer representation of audio samples. In integer audio, the signal is expected to span the entire range of possible values (e.g. -32768 to +32767 for 16-bit integer), and 0 dBFS is at the extremes of that range. In floating point the convention is different: 0 dBFS is ±1.0, but IEEE 32-bit float can represent numbers much larger than this. This leads to the somewhat surprising conclusion that 32-bit float can represent signals above 0 dBFS without clipping. Most digital processing doesn't actually care about the absolute scale and will thus process such "out-of-range" samples just like any other sample. But of course, as soon as one wants to convert to integer, one has to clamp the samples to the ±1.0 range (by convention) in order to map it to the integer scale, and that's where clipping can occur.

The ability for 32-bit float samples to exceed 0 dBFS makes them a very convenient choice for implementing digital filter chains, because that means near-infinite headroom - thus, one doesn't have to care about clipping occurring in the middle of the chain. IMHO, it makes sense for software to operate in 32-bit float right up to the DAC, and this is exactly what foobar, Windows and Equalizer APO are doing in your experiment.

Sometimes I suspect the clipping is already in the recording, for the same reasons discussed above but by mistake of the engineer. Can someone do me a favor and listen this track Hurt Johnny Cash on Tidal. For me the last 30 seconds are clipping into major distortion no matter what I do with EQ but also in the direct mode. Is that something wrong with my chain or you also have it? This might be why I strongly prefer HD music sources, they never clip for me.

 

[danadam]

Sometimes I suspect the clipping is already in the recording, for the same reasons discussed above but by mistake of the engineer.

You assume it wasn't intentional. Opinions on that differ. Just google: johnny cash hurt distortion. There's a couple of threads about that on forums.stevehoffman.tv .

 

[Andro]

You assume it wasn't intentional. Opinions on that differ. Just google: johnny cash hurt distortion. There's a couple of threads about that on forums.stevehoffman.tv .

Lol I see. I will create a separate thread to discuss introducing severe criminal law articles targeting sound engineers. Can you do me another favor, without googling? Please listen the album Saxnbass markusphilippe that is also heavily distorted for me. I fixed almost all saxophone and trumpets distortions in my speakers with parallel notch filters using 0.4 mH inductors (no this cannot be fixed in preamplification). But this album drives me crazy, I cannot fully fix it, however I've made it better than it was. Maybe the distortion was made by the engineer and we can press charges?

 

[Dimitri]

Please listen the album Saxnbass markusphilippe that is also heavily distorted for me.

Hmmmm I took a listen ( it sounds all wrong- either too close miked and/or EQed by a deaf bat ) and had listen to Mancini's The Pink Panther theme to set my ears straight afterwards!!!!!!!!!

 

[Andro]

Hmmmm I took a listen ( it sounds all wrong- either too close miked and/or EQed by a deaf bat ) and had listen to Mancini's The Pink Panther theme to set my ears straight afterwards!!!!!!!!!

Thank you bro! Please consider joining my class action, now we have a case.
This is why HD music is better. It leaves a bad engineer less freedom to hurt people.

 

[Andro]

I wasn't too satisfied with the audio quality even with windows apo disabled, that -4db and doing the rest of the steps. It sounded nowhere close to using Foobar and wasapi. Only days after did I spot an ASUS ICEsound APO service that was still running in my task manager. Disabling it immediately changed the sound while my music was playing. It sounds great now with spotify, youtube, whatnot

However, I think I still prefer just routing everything to VBAudio virtual cable

I think it got better for me after I uninstalled the stupid Realtek driver. Not sure though, I'm still using the Realtek ports sometimes to measure my speakers impedance...

 

[Dimitri]

Can someone do me a favor and listen this track Hurt Johnny Cash on Tidal. For me the last 30 seconds are clipping into major distortion no matter what I do with EQ but also in the direct mode. Is that something wrong with my chain or you also have it?

I listen to it on spotify and they must be using the same infected track....yes it is mangled beyond belief.

The last 30 seconds of Hurt, and the intro to So Far Away and Sultans of Swing.
It sounds as bad as it looks !
So yeah..."it's not you, it's them".

 

[Dimitri]

What is amazing to me and is making my spidey senses tingling the wrong way is that we have achieved the means to have practically perfect reproduction and yet the quality being delivered is going down. Listening to tracks on streaming services is audio russian roulette. You squint when a track starts not being sure if it going to give you goosebumbps of the wrong kind.
Listening to music is supposed to be fun and relaxing.
Not anticipating a bad surprize with every track.
/rant

 

[Andro]

I listen to it on spotify and they must be using the same infected track....yes it is mangled beyond belief.

The last 30 seconds of Hurt, and the intro to So Far Away and Sultans of Swing.
It sounds as bad as it looks !
So yeah..."it's not you, it's them".



View attachment 427115

Oh yes, lol, the "cleanest sound" Dire Straits indeed badly distorted in both So Far Away and Sultans of Swing. However, this on the "Best Of" 2005 compilation from Mercury/Universal. Apparently the whole gig is badly mastered. There is even the mastering engineer name - Bob Ludwig, I'm about to call 911 on him. The original disks from 1985 and 1978 have it too, but not so badly exaggerated. Later masters are just worse. And I want to recommend Tidal service here because they have more and more HD tracks every day. It's not necessary that 24 bits are better than 16 /hidden of course they are hidden/, but the mastering artifacts are a lot less likely because they mix in 32 bits and then castrate it. 16 bits is an abandoned child in this high-res broohaha and frankly I think it's already dead, we just have to assemble together and bury it officially.

Now I want to thank @edechamps for encouraging me to install Equalizer APO few days ago. From a sceptic and exclusive mode aficionado I flipped into EAPO supporter. Apparently the exclusive mode was the last weak link in my chain and I achieved the level of fidelity when I hear distortions in Dire Straits, lol. I also want to thank @Perceval from DIY board (I'll do it later) for recommending me to build around Tang Band W6 2313 coax which turned out to be a bombastic. And BTW my speakers are not even finished, I have a next gen casket drying in my garage. This quality comes from a prototype box with crossover made of random parts joined with WAGO connectors and this indeed great EAPO...

 

[Andro]

what about your speakers?



in a blind test? have you made the Klippel test?

Human ears are more accurate than any measurement microphone under $500. There was a video in the past of a guy testing several measurement mics in $200 range and his conclusion was that they are basically useless in measuring something that a human can easily hear. So unless you are Amir doing this for living, it's very unlikely that you will spend on something like that. Almost nobody here has equipment sufficiently accurate to measure the last mile of performance. Just try to listen, you know...

 

[Chubbs McCallister]

Human ears are more accurate than any measurement microphone under $500. There was a video in the past of a guy testing several measurement mics in $200 range and his conclusion was that they are basically useless in measuring something that a human can easily hear. So unless you are Amir doing this for living, it's very unlikely that you will spend on something like that. Almost nobody here has equipment sufficiently accurate to measure the last mile of performance. Just try to listen, you know...

I am willing to bet $10K (more if you want) that my $150 microphone plus REW can repeatably identify peaks 20dB peaks below 200Hz. Let's do this now.

 

[Andro]

I have to be clear with one thing. If there are two audio sources, the threshold when CAudioLimiter triggers decreases (you guessed it) by 6dB.

Then there are three case scenarios.
a) Critical listening
- You will probably want to listen just to one stream at a time. Then -0,14dB or Exclusive mode will serve the purpose.

b) Listening + background notifications
- PC plays music or movie content, while there is chance that a notification will pop-up, or call will occur.

c) Playing a game, with SFX but playing different music.
Its quite common...

Mostly there are 1-3 audio sources being played at one time, but not more.

I have a somewhat brutal solution for this I'm using. I have regular computer speakers set as default and my music stereo is known only to Tidal, nothing else can play on it. The computer speakers are spherical and thus are also used as a sound diffusor to mitigate table reflections from my stereo - so having 4 speakers on my table is actually improving the sound as well.

 

[Andro]

I am willing to bet $10K (more if you want) that my $150 microphone plus REW can repeatably identify peaks 20dB peaks below 200Hz. Let's do this now.

No that guy was doing something a lot more complex than that - he was playing different unrelated sets of signals set to prime numbers from two completely independent stereo systems placed together. Two computers, two amps, 4 speakers. For a human ear they sounded, obviously, completely independent.
However the $200 mic recorded cross distortion at frequencies derived from those prime numbers at the volume well into the audio range, captured by oscilloscope. Essentially, the mic was totally useless while for the human that was a walk in the park. However, of course you can spend $500, $1000 etc on a mic and it will do it.
Repeat that.

 

[Chubbs McCallister]

No that guy was doing something a lot more complex than that - he was playing different unrelated sets of signals set to prime numbers from two completely independent stereo systems placed together. Two computers, two amps, 4 speakers. For a human ear they sounded, obviously, completely independent.
However the $200 mic recorded cross distortion at frequencies derived from those prime numbers at the volume well into the audio range, captured by oscilloscope. Essentially, the mic was totally useless while for the human that was a walk in the park. However, of course you can spend $500, $1000 etc on a mic and it will do it.
Repeat that.

How did prime numbers factor (lol) into this? Be explicit.

 

[Andro]

How did prime numbers factor (lol) into this? Be explicit.

A distortion peak measured at sum or difference of two prime numbers played from separate stereo systems cannot be derived from any of them independently, thus it can only be the microphone distortion. Non prime numbers will not be sufficiently conclusive.