Believe Windows audio sucks? Think again.

[liverpool_for_life]

My ears have well and truly been opened. I have not heard as much detail in the music as I do today on my laptop. Songs that I have heard thousands of times before startle me with details that I simply haven't heard before.

Many, many thanks to He Who Shall Not Be Named

 

[Gecko]

My ears have well and truly been opened. I have not heard as much detail in the music as I do today on my laptop. Songs that I have heard thousands of times before startle me with details that I simply haven't heard before.

Many, many thanks to He Who Shall Not Be Named

Can you tell us what you did that made the difference

 

[Kannan]

Can you tell us what you did that made the difference

Tweaks from the mystery man who operates at the core level of windows operating system. I am sure Gates would be flabbergasted

 

[liverpool_for_life]

Can you tell us what you did that made the difference

I got lucky! Seriously. I contacted the FM in question for another playback problem I was experiencing. One thing led to another, and the next thing you know, he was optimizing my PC for music playback. And then, the kicker: He had written a s/w to further optimize music playback on a Windows PC. Would I be interested in trying it out? Hell, yes!

All I can say is that I'm so glad that I did. It has absolutely transformed my music listening!

 

[liverpool_for_life]

Tweaks from the mystery man who operates at the core level of windows operating system.

Are you a fellow beneficiary of the mystery man's largesse as well?

 

[Kannan]

Are you a fellow beneficiary of the mystery man's largesse as well?

Not yet. Happy with my Allo transport.
I too have gone quite deep with windows tweaking for audio, but our guruji I guess has more aces up his sleeve.
Maybe will take his blessings sometime in the near future.

 

[panditji]

I wonder who could it be...

 

[liverpool_for_life]

I wonder who could it be...

I'm sure you'll agree that he's one to "Beware of"

 

[greenhorn]

Is this about the F word?

 

[Music Freak]

One of the most enigmatic threads I have come across here! Will this remain as one?!

 

[liverpool_for_life]

One of the most enigmatic threads I have come across here! Will this remain as one?!

Yes. Mods, please lock this thread.

p.s. Windows audio most definitely doesn't suck

 

[IndianEars]

I'm sure sure I see the point of this thread.

It makes a statement without any support of it.

It talks about an improvement, without sharing how ...

It Talks about a person, without mentioning the name or contact details.

Seems like a privileged chat between a few friends.... Why this thread ?

 

[rsjaurr]

I'm sure sure I see the point of this thread.

It makes a statement without any support of it.

It talks about an improvement, without sharing how ...

It Talks about a person, without mentioning the name or contact details.

Seems like a privileged chat between a few friends.... Why this thread ?

Yeah, I agree. No sense at all so far. This much chat they should have done in their WhatsApp group instead of wasting a few KB of space .

 

[panditji]

There is an option of ignoring and holding yourself back from commenting if you don't find any thread useful.. Doesn't necessarily need to make sense to everyone... Do exercise your rights..

 

[MaSh]

Ha ha one of those threads that make complete sense out of No Sense.

MaSh

 

[firearm12]

Yes i can see windows is not a virus, viruses are small and efficient.

 

[liverpool_for_life]

Seems like a privileged chat between a few friends....

I can see why you see it like that. In this case though, I see myself more as being fortunate rather than privileged.

I understand that folks don't really take Windows seriously when playing back stuff and I simply wanted to pique people's curiosity in this regard. Unfortunately, that hasn't happened.

I apologize for not being able to provide more details (I have to respect the author's request for anonymity), but for folks that are interested in optimizing their Windows PC for music playback, I can point to the Audiophile Optimizer (https://www.highend-audiopc.com/audiophile-optimizer). Whether it is worth the asking price is for folks to decide on their own. No, it is not what I use. I've heard that it gets pretty close though to what I do use.

 

[firearm12]

any optimizations aside, any player that claims audiophile enhancements or bitperfect play like jplay, audirvana, jriver process sound internally. But people do like the sound that come out from them. If you are purist, stay away from them.

 

[Music Freak]

There is an option of ignoring and holding yourself back from commenting if you don't find any thread useful.. Doesn't necessarily need to make sense to everyone... Do exercise your rights..

Panditji, it's against the elemental & conventional 'Forum' behaviour to hold oneself back.

 

[venkatcr]

Windows was never designed for playing audio or even video. Just because it is used extensively and is so user friendly, we expect it to do everything perfectly. Whatever magic we do with the OS, a laptop or a PC does not have the hardware to play music of high quality. I do believe Asus has some special circuitry in some of their models, but that is also meant for games.

That said, if you can send an audio file in digital format to an external DAC, why do you need to do anything else? If you are going to listen to music from your laptop, use a set a good speakers, and the audio is of fairly decent quality. I listen to an hour of music every day using a software called Audacious and a set of speakers that costs a ridiculous 10$ (https://us.geniusnet.com/product/sp-hf160/), and I don't find anything greatly amiss in it. I bought these speakers a long time ago is some supermarket in Dubai. I was attracted, as then, these were the only ones with wooden boxes. Now, of course, there are umpteen others available.

You play a Blu-ray disk from an HTPC and a regular player, you can see the difference. There is nothing wrong with the PC. Just that it is not optimized for the task and is dependent on too many hardware and software that are in the path of the media. That is one of the reasons, why after using a HTPC for over 10 years, I am actively looking at moving to a media player.

All that aside, I think Raspberry Pi and associated DACs have made the concept of fooling around with Windows completely redundant. An RPi3 + an Allo DAC comes well under 7K, and that beats the pants off most systems. It is so tiny, you can keep it next to your laptop and hear music in genuine HiFi. You can even stick it with double sided tapes under you table, so it does not take any space. And, you can control it from your Windows system. And the best is that you can misuse the system thoroughly. Switch it off halfway, keep it on the whole day, forget to switch it off before you go to bed.... it seems to take all this with a smile. No licensing and other issues are other great advantages. I never even had to rewrite the OS in nearly 6 moths of abusive usage of the poor system. For safety's sake, I have a duplicate copy of the OS and software on another SD Card.

Why would I even bother fooling around with Windows? No offence to you liverpool. You are more than welcome to use Windows the way you want to.

Cheers