I have to be honest, this post started as a huge rant against Creative and their "boo-hoo" attitude about Vista drivers. But I decided to instead write about the benefits that the audio changes in Vista will bring about. We should be nearing the end of the lifetime of specialized cards with dedicated APU's (audio processing units), such as the Creative X-Fi, thanks to most audio processing being shifted back to CPU's, now that dual-core and quad-core processors are a reality.

And thank goodness. I've owned about 4 Creative soundcards over the years, and they were all considered the best available at the time.. but I always had numerous problems with them, either with hardware compability or drivers. And who really is competing with Creative right now anyhow? I briefly tried a Philips soundcard, only to find that the drivers were complete junk. Should I just use my motherboard's onboard sound? That might work if I just have a stereo speaker system, but myself, and many others have 4.1, 5.1 and sometimes even 7.1 surround sound systems hooked up to our computers. Most on-board audio solutions either don't let you hook up more than 2 speakers, or they severely limit your surround capabilities.

For example, let's say I was listening to something that had a lot of bass in it. You'd expect your subwoofer to be playing back the deeper tones, right? On older multi-speaker systems, there was a crossover built into the amplifier unit that always sent certain frequencies to your subwoofer. With newer and more typical multi-speaker systems (such as those run through receivers), your amplifier is expecting you to just send the raw audio signal to your subwoofer. Creative cards such as the Audigy and X-Fi have a feature that does this for you automatically. That way the "booms" go to your subwoofer instead of wimply trying to be recreated by your tiny cube speakers. Most on-board sound cards do not have this feature! It just isn't in their hardware at all.

But thanks to Vista's new audio stack, you'll be able to get this feature "for free", as well as other enhancements:

Bass Management does what I was just describing, essentially acting as a cross-over for all audio passing through your speakers. It defaults to 80Hz, which may be just coincidence, but it’s what THX recommends if you’re using all-THX approved hardware/speakers. Most people are not. So you may want to up it to 100 or 120, which is what most people are using anyway. Check your actual speaker’s specifications to see what frequencies the speakers and subwoofer can reproduce and go from there. In the “settings” panel for this enhancement, you are able to adjust the crossover, change the room size (unknown what effect this has), and inverse the subwoofer’s polarity.

Speaker Fill allows you to “upmix” a stereo signal into more than 2 speakers. With this option enabled, there are no settings you can change. It just automagically happens. It seems to do a fairly decent job, and is comparable to the “CMSS” feature found on Creative soundcards. Liken it to a version of “Dolby Pro-Logic” for all your audio content.

Room Correction is a pretty exciting feature that is usually only found in high-end receivers. It allows you to use your computer’s microphone, placed at eye/head level, to automatically have Vista calculate what delay and amplification each speaker should have. This is very important in order to ensure that an equal sound level is coming from all speakers based on your regular listening position. My harmon/kardon receiver has this feature built into the remote, and it made a huge difference for me in setting up my speakers initially.

Loudness Equalization is essentially a real-time soft compression on all audio, making all sound stay at a constant level, whether it’s blaring or quiet. This comes in handy for watching videos, etc. where the volume may be different for each one.

I went looking on the web to see if anyone else had done an extensive write-up on Windows Vista’s audio stack, from more of a consumer perspective, but didn’t come up with much. I found some very technical documentation on Microsoft’s site, as well as a write up from Microsoft’s Larry Osterman regarding what’s changed in Vista versus XP. I also found an article on ExtremeTech about gaming audio and Vista, which is a subject I was very interested in, because I play a lot of PC games.

When Microsoft announced the new Vista audio stack, they also dropped a “bombshell” — DirectSound3D could no longer be accelerated by hardware. This meant that those shiny Audigy, X-Fi, etc. cards were now semi-useless. You can read all about it on the OpenAL site. I’ve already run into this problem myself. I installed Dungeon Siege II and fired it up, went into the options and tried to turn EAX on, only to have the game tell me I don’t have EAX hardware. Huh? Well, the lack of hardware acceleration explains it. Creative is suggesting that everyone move to the “OpenAL” model of sound acceleration, which only recently (past 2 years or so?) started to get used by developers. Here’s hoping that the development studios are paying attention to this technical paradigm shift, and are planning accordingly.

According to the ExtremeTech article, Creative is working on a “wrapper” to emulate full DirectSound and pass those calls to the OpenAL driver, in order to fix these older games. Here’s hoping it works. It would be a shame to lose EAX/3D audio on almost 80% of my games…

I remember when Half-Life 2 was about to come out.. I was shocked that Valve wasn’t implementing EAX support into the game. But then I realized that they were actually doing something better for the consumer by allowing any audio chipset to reproduce the game’s sound effects. That’s why right now, in Vista, I can run HL2 on both my X-Fi and on-board audio and get the same great sound quality out of both, with full effects in 5.1. And that’s the way it should be, in my humble opinion.