Vista/Win7 - how to set 2/3 to better quality than 16/48 which give noise issue...

xor_2

Hello
As many already know Vista and it's younger brother Windows7 seems to not like 16bit/48KHz setting and give strange background noise when there is any application using sound eg. winamp And this noise is on any sound card so it is definitely coming from vista/win7 sound subsystem When in any sound card I set eg. 24/96 there is no noise at all...

And as KX uses 16/48 for everything else than buggy "Master Mixer" (which clicks and pops ) I and everyone else have to listen to this annoying noise

Is there some way to force 2/3 to something that doesn't give noise like 16/96, 24/48, 32/48, 32/96 etc. ? Or atleast is there a way to make Master Mixer not to click and pop as it give no noise as it is 32/48?

ps. I have Audigy4PRO, if it can help somehow solving this issue...

RPGWiZaRD

I don't know what you guys are doing wrong, I yet haven't heard any background noise nor any clicks or pops or whatever in Windows 7. Using Wave 4/5 that is ported to the first slots (4000 & 40001) in the xrouting plugin. Has worked fine in both XP, Vista & Windows 7 with both an Audigy 1 and Audigy 2 ZS on like 3 different motherboards and 2 different chipsets (Intel P35 and P55).

xor_2

Fortunatelly KX allow me to use internal tools to show this noise

I attached three files. Two are with simplified DSP setup with onlu FXBusX as input, Peak as monitor and k2lt as output and first is on 2/3 and second on Master Mixer. The Difference is quite audible too on my headphones...

There is third file too with default DSP setup and Master Mixer (with 2/3 or SPDIF/AC3 it is -90dB) and it shows some noises too but in this case those are too weak to be audible Probably these are from unmuted inputs or something, but I don't care as I use my own DSP setups anyway which are always noisefree

In this few years I test/use Vista back from Beta2 there was always noise when sound card output was set to 16/44 or 16/48 so to me it is quite obvious it is NT6.x issue and not KXes But it would be quite nice if one can change 2/3 (and other similiar outputs) to something like 32/48 to get rid of this noise

Fortunately for me Master Mixer doesn't click&pop when I set larger buffers I virtually doubled it in one go and now have to lower it to find lowest good settings coz big buffers give laggy sound

ps. Ofcourse there must be at least one application in OS which have initialised sound and have open channels eg. winamp or media player classic with plaing file and muted sound. With no open sound buffers there is no noise even on 16/48...

edit://
I found that noise in default DSP setup is caused by "Reverb Lite" and as quicfix it should be deleted or bypassed...

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Russ

Just out of curiosity:
With wave 2/3 (when not muted) does the signal ever exceed 0dB?
Is there any difference if you use FxBus instead of FxBusX?

BTW: You might also try using ASIO and/or Kernel Streaming for playback (assuming you have a player that supports it) as well and see how they compare (IIRC, both should support 16/48 or 24/48 (with FxBusX), with the appropriate settings).

xor_2

no, never ever happens, but I don't even see a chance for it to happen cause OS can't really send value out of unsigned 16-bit range and even if it is crapping out sound it wont cause it to clip that way so we can see it on Peak Somebody would have to create some "killer sample" like udial.wav (on which by the way I have some more serious issue which I post in near future... )

as for Asio & KS I can't yet get Asio to run on my Win7 x86 on any of my Winamp plugins Kernel Streaming seems to works fine on 2/3 without noise, at least if I don't set 2/3 as my default output in windows But it doesn't resample and it makes it quite useless, at least when resampling plugins aren't used, but those are more cpu demanding and don't seem to sound better than windows resampler so why bother?

there is also OpenAL plugin which work exactly just like DirectSound with resampling by windows and everything (on Creative drivers there weren't any resampling on OpenAL just like on KernelStreaming). Even when OS is set to use MasterMixer both DirectSound and OpenlAL can cause noise to appear when set do output to 2/3... So disabling those "devices" isn't bad idea to protect self from it...

FXBusX is one that seem to have sound from MasterMixer so I don't have much choice But 2/3 work on every input plugin and have this noise...

RPGWiZaRD

Well here's how I've setup mine, I use the standard DSP config which I modify slightly, I use Wave4/5 and ofc need to connect FXBus4 [8004] and 5 [8005] ports from FXBusX to xrouting to WaveL [4000] and WaveR [4001] ports and apply any plugins I want to use there between and Reverb and similiar plugins I add between FXMix2 and xrouting so I can adjust the level of these with the 2 sliders in FX section for the kX settings. xrouting is connected to corresponding port on the surrounder+ plugin to get Surround sound work properly with it enabled. The rest there is just bullshit but it works well so haven't really been bothered. On my setup at least, I found Wave 4/5 to produce the best sound quality (exceeds Win XP mastermixer in quality even), tested both with Audigy1 and Audigy 2 ZS on Windows 7 and on 3 different motherboards (all intel chipset tho). In Windows XP, mastermixer works best (apart from the very few games that might produce audio stuttering with H/W accelerated sound enabled).

ALSO, make sure your windows volume level slider for corresponding output you use isn't maxed (adjust the kX master volume instead!), this will produce corrupted sound I noticed in most players or applications if you adjust the volume in those to be at reasonable levels (fine at very low volumes). I personally found 33% to be suitable on the windows 7 volume slider for Wave 4/5 to get nearly same volume levels as Win XP with mastermixer (in kX settings, master volume set to "13" in Windows XP corresponds to around same level as "15" in Windows 7 with the Windows 7 Wave4/5 output volume slider set to 33%). Using these settings you can adjust any external application volume sliders without fear of sound corruption.

I'm using headphones so have to constantly adjust the volume sliders rather than a knob on a speaker so that's how I found out this.

In future versions of kX Audio driver I'd maybe suggest adjusting the volume levels on the different outputs for at least the 64bit driver a bit so we can at least avoid users complaining about corrupted sound. Together with Windows 7 own and kX volume slider which both works independently, it's way too high set default but you can for example use Windows 7 volume slider at 2% but set kX master volume to 100 and it will work fine but it won't work as good the other way so just reduce the Windows 7 volume slider rather.

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xor_2

@RPGWiZaRD
say what?
first of all wave 4/5 have only 16bit resolution and setting volume to 2% will cripple it. 16bit make possibility to use 65536 steps for speaker membrane. Setting sound volume to eg. half volume does make now only 32768 steps available. 2% make only 1310,72 steps which isn't even full 11bit's (2048 steps) but not much more than 10bit's It's much better in terms of sound quality to set 100% volume in players and OS and manipulate it from KX Mixer...

It wouldn't be such issue if everything operated at 32bit (2% of 2^32 is 85899346...) as it was supposed but as far as I can see only KX DSP internals operates at 32bit and all comunications from OS is done in crappy 16bit even on MasterMixer (which should be 32bit as is stated in it's properties ) But sound behave nothing like it was send in 32bit Tried even foobar with kernel streaming instead and got the same crappy results

Anyway, with 16-bit CD-Audio there is not much that can be done OS and driver should comunicate at 24bit or 32bit to make sure there is no further quality loss All that can be done for now is to set volume in audio player and OS at 100% and use KX's volume sliders

Playing antything at very very very low volume eg. -95dB volume in foobar always result at -90dB (-96dB after correcting volume to 50% - which makes more sense... ) noise what is just like setting default output to eg. 2/3 gives, but noise from 2/3 is much worse and more audible

As for wrong volume U have right there. Correction must be applied or else there will be clipping, especially on higher frequencies. Udial.wav and WaveGenerator 3.0 shows that if 50% volume is applied in "St Vol" everything sounds fine. It seems that high frequency sounds with volume lower that -6dB cause weird sounds and 50% volume setting lowers volume exactly by -6dB

RPGWiZaRD

I was just saying lower the windows volume slider a bit down from 100% (not to 2%!, I was just giving an example that windows volume slider is buggy for kX audio drivers in Win 7 and causes sound corruption when set too high but setting high volume in kX settings won't) but I use 33% and get rid of the distortion/corruption or whatever, will prolly work at higher than 33% but this is what get me same volume lvl as in Win XP (when using mastermixer in XP the kX Audio master volume and windows volume sliders cooperate so you have only 1 volume slider instead of 2 in Win 7) which I found suitable. As kX master volume I usually have set between 15 - 24 in Win 7 so there's like plenty of headroom, at 100% I'd prolly damage my hearing in a matter of like 2 secs. xD

So dunno what you're naggling about, I've never heard such a good sound quality, the reason I'm not interested in buying a new sound card because an Audigy + kX Audio drivers have better sound quality than most soundcards out there, at least it easily beats an X-Fi card + Creative's drivers because I've compared the quality at some friends. Especially the pseudo surround sound in kX audio drivers from Surrounder+ plugin is simply amazing, it's almost like using a radar cheat so you know exactly where enemy is moving for my clangaming in UT3! And another example showing how amazingly well it works is running PCSX2 PS2 emulator and Resident Evil 4 for example, you'll be able to tell precisely where the zombies are if you're inside a house and they are outside making some noise, the emulator itself doesn't have any kind of surround sound support, it's the kX Audio drivers that creates it. And in L4D I can shoot zombies hiding behind trees based on where the noise comes from, pretty nice for a stereo (headphone) setup. ^^

So enjoy corrupted sound if you actually have windows volume slider set to 100% I have no idea about the technical stuff, I simply go by what I'm hearing.

xor_2

Windows volume slider is buggy, it is not even working I can only change specific applications volume and nothing more in my Vista HB x86 and Win7 HP x86. The same goes for XP Home except there aren't even applications volume sliders so I can only change volume in KX. Volume in all my windowses are the same too and there are no distortion of any sorts on OS side. Only at volume higher that -6dB there can be some distiortion on very high frequencies (like eg. 19.5KHz) and I measured that by Wave Generator 3.0 so it's internal DSP engine thing and probably not even related to KX... -6dB volume and problem is solved and without loosing one single bit

I don't say KX have bad sound quality. Creative driver's have bad sound quality, not KX. My Audigy4PRO on Creative drivers isn't even tenth what it is with KX Now that I got Master Mixer to work without cracks I am quite happy with how my CD-Audio and FLACs sounds (full 16-bit quality and without resampling issues)

But anyway it would be nice if KX had true 32bit communication with OS coz then eg. 50% sound volume set in windows mixer would mean there is 6dB less noise that comes from limitation of 16-bit audio (like it is whet volume is changed from KX side) but as for now there is always this -96dB noise even on Master Mixer used along with 32-bit capable programs...