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1. What Does Vista Stand For
2. Test Sound Card

In the latest episode of PC World's The Full Nerd, and tackle the rather controversial topic of who killed PC Gaming audio, and what its future might look like. My take is as follows:Microsoft 'killed' PC Gaming audio when they got rid of the audio HAL and DSP effects with Vista when they got rid of DirectAudio. Suddenly games had to use their own software audio solution, and hardware 'gaming' sound made less sense. (yes, there are workarounds like OpenAL for older soundcards, but.)So, these days, there is no need for DSP anymore, as game devs are forced to do everything in software. This essentially tuns the sound card into nothing but a DAC.Truth is PC audio is not dead though. It's just moved on. The people who are really into good sound on their PC's have since noticed that inside their PC's on a PCIe bus filled with gigahertz noise is the worst possible place for a DAC, as it winds up being noisy (hearing your hard drive, mouse movements, or water pump through your speakers/headphones)That is why those who are serious about audio use external DAC's these days.

I - for one - am VERY happy with my Schiit Modi Multibit DAC hooked up to my old X-Fi Titanium HD using toslink optical, and playing through my Schiit Jotunheim headphone amp on my Sennheiser HD650's. My take is as follows:Microsoft 'killed' PC Gaming audio when they got rid of the audio HAL and DSP effects with Vista when they got rid of DirectAudio. Suddenly games had to use their own software audio solution, and hardware 'gaming' sound made less sense. (yes, there are workarounds like OpenAL for older soundcards, but.)So, these days, there is no need for DSP anymore, as game devs are forced to do everything in software. This essentially tuns the sound card into nothing but a DAC.Truth is PC audio is not dead though. It's just moved on. The people who are really into good sound on their PC's have since noticed that inside their PC's on a PCIe bus filled with gigahertz noise is the worst possible place for a DAC, as it winds up being noisy (hearing your hard drive, mouse movements, or water pump through your speakers/headphones)That is why those who are serious about audio use external DAC's these days.

I - for one - am VERY happy with my Schiit Modi Multibit DAC hooked up to my old X-Fi Titanium HD using toslink optical, and playing through my Schiit Jotunheim headphone amp on my Sennheiser HD650's. Click to expand.Completely agree.

That was one of my biggest 'WTF' moments when moving to Vista. Went from having all this wonderful hardware 3D surround sound back down to basically stereo expansion until libraries like FMOD and OpenAL came around.

What Does Vista Stand For

But like most things when put into the hands of the developers support for 3D sound in software is very hit and miss in the quality of the implementation. And Microsoft's newer solution, XAudio, doesn't cut it most of the time.To be fair, the Sound Blaster Zx in my PC has pretty good shielding on it, and I can't hear any kind of electronic interference coming through the attached speakers or headphones even with it being right next to my video card.

Microsoft killed PC audio when Vista was released. Before Vista, sound cards could use their ability to accelerate audio to relieve the CPU. After that, pretty much those sound cards in Vista and beyond were just DAC's. The other problem with PC audio is licensing issues. Dolby Digital Live or DTS is a feature that's mostly disabled in drivers nowadays.

Like a lot of Realtek chips can do DDL and DTS, but isn't enabled. There are hacks to enable this. So because of this, 5.1 digital sound is kinda a licensing issue that nobody wants to pay for. Even if you did get it working, it's mostly done on the CPU.

I think even Creative does this now with their sound cards, which they are known for their hardware acceleration. Microsoft killed PC audio when Vista was released.

Before Vista, sound cards could use their ability to accelerate audio to relieve the CPU. After that, pretty much those sound cards in Vista and beyond were just DAC's. The other problem with PC audio is licensing issues. Dolby Digital Live or DTS is a feature that's mostly disabled in drivers nowadays. Like a lot of Realtek chips can do DDL and DTS, but isn't enabled. There are hacks to enable this.

So because of this, 5.1 digital sound is kinda a licensing issue that nobody wants to pay for. Even if you did get it working, it's mostly done on the CPU. I think even Creative does this now with their sound cards, which they are known for their hardware acceleration. Amazing post.I never knew why my audio disappeared, I just woke up one day and realized it sucked compared to what I remembered. I even doubted myself that I was remembering it correctly.I think I know why this happened.

In about 2007 I went to Iraq and I had no computer, in fact, I loaned my desktop gaming rig to my kid. While I was in Iraq I bought an ASUS G1S laptop which wasn't a big time gaming laptop but it was good for where I was and what I needed, and so my overall gaming experience was already reduced. The G1S was a Vista only laptop, ASUS wouldn't release XP drivers and such. But where there is a will there is a way, I found common hardware on other ASUS laptops and collected all the drivers I needed, ordered in a 64GB SSD for like $989 bucks cause $1000 was my limit. And I order a copy of Xp Pro and slipstreamed those drivers into the build and got Xp Pro running.

It was pretty damn good.By the time I got back, Vista had been beat so hard, Win 7 was coming out, so I bought that and skipped Vista, and my next laptop was an ASUS G-whatever with the 'Stealth' fighter look. And after that I bought a Razer Blade, and finally I decided I wasn't working on the road any more, didn't need gaming laptops, and I could go back to a new Desktop build. And so it's like just a couple years ago and I wanted that old desktop awesome audio and I couldn't find it. I never knew that it was gone, I just thought I couldn't find it.I hope we get it back.BTW, That killer setup I had was an HT Omega 7.1 card and the headset was Madusa's, OMG the best. If someone remembers what that quality was like and knows how to get it today, I'd be happy to hear it. Back in the day (more than 8 years ago) I really enjoyed using sound cards because it took some of the load off of my single core CPU and let me hook up my 5.1 Klipsch setup.

At line selection in sap abap example. ABAP Example Sample Abap Code ABAP Example Sample ABAP CodeABAP/4 stands for Advanced Business Application Programming is the programminglanguage used for the thousand of tiny embedded programs called transactionsthat make up the SAP application.ABAP programs are objects of the R/3 Repository.

These days, the onboard optical out to a receiver does a much better job and it is a much simpler solution (just 2.1 setup though). I think PC audio had just kind of moved on. My builds these days seem much more simple with no other cards plugged into my mobo except for my two video cards.However, in the next year or so I will be streaming games to my home theater setup so I will have to reevaluate what is required to get proper surround sound from my PC. Cheap on-board codecs killed PC audio.because Creative (and all of the smaller manufacturers of hardware-based audio AICs) failed to grasp it as a viable threat 20 years ago.But now they are starting to make up for lost time with their Core3D on-board offerings (which they should have done in some fashion when the ATX design was introduced back in 1995). If they had, then Creative would still likely be one of the biggest PC AIC companies ($33M net loss last year vs RealTek's $2.4B net income), and probably would still have a massively diverse product portfolio, including (their now defunct) GPU's, optical drives, and handheld audio players.as a few examples. Microsoft ditching hardware audio support was pretty much the final nail in the coffin but Creative dominated the market for too long and became a shitty company so sound cards were already dying out at that point.I vowed to not buy another product from Creative after spending a few hundred on a SB Live Platinum only to never have all of the features work properly because they dropped support a couple months after launch and never made decent drivers for it. By the time I was ready replace it there were some other companies starting to make good sound cards again but then MS dropped hardware audio support so I've just made sure any MB I get has halfway decent onboard audio and call it good enough, maybe one of these days I'll get an external DAC and some good speakers but games tend to use compressed audio and I already have a good system for music so I'm not sure what the point would be.

Test Sound Card

One of the very first things I noticed about Windows Vista was while playing a game if the sound drivers crashed I did not have to reboot my computer to continue. I could simple hit ctrl-alt-delete, launch task manager, shut down the game and than restart the game without rebooting. To be honest I cannot remember the last time I have experienced the once common audio crash.I could be wrong but I suspect the limitation in audio quality for most people is more effected by one's speakers or headphones than the audio component in their computer.