HighTreason wrote:

Can't speak for Windows 8 because I don't own anything that meets the minimum spec for it.

How is that, since the minimum spec for Windows 8 is virtually identical to that of Windows 7?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_7#Hardwa … e_compatibility
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_8#Hardware_requirements
A decent Pentium 4 or Athlon64 should do.

Your processor needs the SSE2 instruction set as well as PAE support, which is not required for Windows 7.

Evert wrote:

Your processor needs the SSE2 instruction set as well as PAE support, which is not required for Windows 7.

As I say, a Pentium 4 or Athlon64 will fit that requirement. Which is early 2000s technology. So I wonder what machines he runs Windows 7 on then?
Although older machines can theoretically run Windows 7, I don't think anyone would use such an old machine as their primary box, as they are just too slow even for some simple webbrowsing.

Yeah, sorry, was a bit lazy with the reading there. Well, I've personally ran Windows 7 SP1 32-Bit on an AMD Sempron 3000+, 2Gb RAM, Radeon X800 XL system and it works, albeit a bit laggy. I'm pretty sure it will run on like a fast Socket 370 or Athlon XP system.

HighTreason wrote:

These days dedicated sound cards are useless as the operating system no longer supports advanced features such as real-time pass-through of Mic/Line inputs, you can only record from one input at a time and the Stereo Mix is gone. I have to run an old Win98 box next to the newer machine now to compensate.

Also, I swear the audio quality is lower in Windows 7 for some reason. My Audigy 2 ZS Platinum gets this weird muffled chorusing going on in Win7... Can't speak for Windows 8 because I don't own anything that meets the minimum spec for it.

I'm pretty sure that most semi-pro sound cards with ASIO drivers can sort things like recording from multiple inputs at the same time mostly in hardware, disregarding what limitations Windows might impose. I haven't actually tried doing recently, but I'm almost 100% certain that my DMX 6Fire USB can record multiple inputs at the same time.

Evert wrote:

Yeah, sorry, was a bit lazy with the reading there. Well, I've personally ran Windows 7 SP1 32-Bit on an AMD Sempron 3000+, 2Gb RAM, Radeon X800 XL system and it works, albeit a bit laggy. I'm pretty sure it will run on like a fast Socket 370 or Athlon XP system.

Sure, the OS will work, but applications won't 😀
I have some old Windows XP machines that are useless for things like webbrowsing... You'd need a modern browser like Chrome, which is far too bloated for these old machines. And websites are filled with JavaScript and other nonsense these days, which makes them very unresponsive. Aside from that, a lot of sites have embedded YouTube or other videos... you can just forget about playing those back properly as well. I have a Celeron 1.6 GHz (Pentium 4 Northwood-based), and it will just barely play a 360p stream properly.

In theory I could probably install Windows 7 on these machines, and the OS itself will probably run about as well as XP does, but it doesn't solve the problems with the demands of applications these days.
Therefore I say, if you have a machine that actually is *usable* with Windows 7 for everyday use, then you probably have something that well exceeds Windows 8 minimum specs as well. Because I would say that anything below a 2 GHz dualcore CPU and at least 2 GB of memory is useless for everyday use period.
And if you have a machine like that, Windows 8 will actually run better than Windows 7, because it is more resource-efficient, has a better thread scheduler etc.

LunarG wrote:

I'm pretty sure that most semi-pro sound cards with ASIO drivers can sort things like recording from multiple inputs at the same time mostly in hardware, disregarding what limitations Windows might impose. I haven't actually tried doing recently, but I'm almost 100% certain that my DMX 6Fire USB can record multiple inputs at the same time.

Yes, ASIO drivers pretty much bypass Windows completely. They are a direct low-level interface to the audio driver, and don't have to abide by any restrictions that Windows imposes on its kernel mixer, WinMM, DirectSound and whatnot.
They have no problem recording multiple inputs at the same time.

HighTreason wrote:

These days dedicated sound cards are useless as the operating system no longer supports advanced features such as real-time pass-through of Mic/Line inputs, you can only record from one input at a time and the Stereo Mix is gone. I have to run an old Win98 box next to the newer machine now to compensate.

Also, I swear the audio quality is lower in Windows 7 for some reason. My Audigy 2 ZS Platinum gets this weird muffled chorusing going on in Win7... Can't speak for Windows 8 because I don't own anything that meets the minimum spec for it.

As I said in the other thread about X-fi cards, I found that features like CMSS-3D are never disabled entirely unless you tick the "disable Sound Blaster enhancements" box in the sound card properties. Maybe that's why you're hearing muffled sound?

I did find one actual improvement in Windows 7's audio stack compared to XP: MIDI interfaces no longer require exclusive access, you can now have multiple programs use the same MIDI interface without blocking each other. 😉

I find that the Pentium 4 2.8 with HT is the divider between useful Internet computer and... nice retro computer.
Any P4 (or Celeron D) without HT will struggle with the "modern" Internet.

I can still pass through inputs in Windows 8.1 it's called "Listen to this Device". The other device is called "What U Hear". It's handy for example recording something with Bandicam and mixing in line-in from a Sound Blaster and commentary from a webcam plus the Windows desktop sound. But yea, any Realtek chip can do the same under Windows 8.1, doesn't take a fancy sound card.

philscomputerlab wrote:

I can still pass through inputs in Windows 8.1 it's called "Listen to this Device".

In newer Windows this is an 'active' monitoring thing though.
It even works across devices. So I can monitor a USB audio interface on a PCI soundcard for example. Windows just forwards the data from one device to the next.

@Scali; I don't have one that can run Windows 7 properly either. Win 8 simply refuses to install on the one machine I could find drivers for.

@Other members - there are a few of you covering the same things and I'm in a hurry; Listen to this device doesn't bring the signal through in real-time, there is a slight delay (About three seconds on my machine, shorter on my friends system). There isn't an option for Creative enhancements and it doesn't matter what card I use or what I set the sample rate to, though disabling SPDIF makes it a bit better somehow - problem with that is I need SPDIF. Also ASIO is pointless as the applications I use rely on the Windows mixer or the actual output of the card being fed into something else. The MIDI thing... That explains the increased latency, and I thought XP was bad... I remember when you could map each channel to a different device without needing expensive software, I used Cakewalk anyway, but I never used to have to fire it up if I already knew how the channels needed to be in a file.

Another strange behavior I noticed is that the volume doesn't go as high. That mixer is a joke though, real-time adjustments of individual inputs are almost impossible. Stands to reason though because useability clearly wasn't on the agenda when they designed Windows 7.

No delay on mine I can assure you. 3 seconds? You're doing something wrong.

Get Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium HD + Corsair SP2500 and feel the difference.

philscomputerlab wrote:

No delay on mine I can assure you. 3 seconds? You're doing something wrong.

Sorry man, but I raise a sincere middle finger to that response because I'm tired of that attitude, how about a constructive reply stating what I did wrong and how? I fail to see how installing drivers followed by attempting to do the same things that worked for the previous two decades is doing something wrong.

Doesn't matter anyway, I only need the Line-In, everything is handled by a Windows 98 box with some modified SBPCI cards now - or it will be when I mange to find a new machine in the trash, meanwhile I've just left the one I have on XP because it doesn't go online anyway.

HighTreason wrote:

Sorry man, but I raise a sincere middle finger to that response because I'm tired of that attitude, how about a constructive reply stating what I did wrong and how? I fail to see how installing drivers followed by attempting to do the same things that worked for the previous two decades is doing something wrong.

No need to get personal. If you require assistance with your computer, please open a new thread.

LunarG wrote:

For most people, the speakers (or headphones) will always be the weakest link.

The distortion and frequency response problems with *any* headphone, or speaker (and room if we're talking speaker), even at the hilariously expensive ultra high end will be many orders of magnitude worse than any modern soundcard (which are usually very hard to pick apart without measurement). I do agree that it's kind of silly when you see those setups with $5 PC speakers and a $250 soundcard and the user insisting "and I can tell the difference between 319kbit and 320kbit mp3s too!" 😵

As far as headphones - I'm not sure what your experience is with headphones, but there are some very good examples out there, which can rival the best speakers in many ways. Still doesn't mean that the user gains super-human ability to pick apart differences that exist below the threshold of amplifier, output transducer, human perception, etc. 😊

I would disagree with tone controls, EQ, etc being the end of the world - especially for speakers, where they can usually help things out quite a bit in terms of "fixing" response for the room. Of course that's only recently that I'd say this; old-school "insert" processors and EQs tended to bring a lot of noise and garbage into the mix, but modern digital gear usually just does what it's supposed to do and is otherwise inaudible.

100% agree with different tastes for different folks as well. 😀

LunarG wrote:

I'm pretty sure that most semi-pro sound cards with ASIO drivers can sort things like recording from multiple inputs at the same time mostly in hardware, disregarding what limitations Windows might impose. I haven't actually tried doing recently, but I'm almost 100% certain that my DMX 6Fire USB can record multiple inputs at the same time.

It depends on how "multiple inputs" is defined, and what application is using ASIO (ASIO is not an end in and of itself, it's an I/O protocol to pass data between an audio interface and a target application). Most DAW applications will accept up to whatever the single-device input limit is, so if your interface will do four inputs, you get four inputs in the DAW. Some DAW applications will accept "ganged" or multiple device input, so if you have device A doing four inputs and add device B for another two inputs, you can now record six inputs assuming the drivers of the two devices play nice (and don't impose some stupid licence restriction (I'm looking at you, M-Audio)).

Dreamer_of_the_past wrote:

Get Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium HD + Corsair SP2500 and feel the difference.

I remember hearing a lot about those speakers before they came out, and now it seems like they've vanished. Any impressions in real-world use?

obobskivich wrote:

assuming the drivers of the two devices play nice (and don't impose some stupid licence restriction (I'm looking at you, M-Audio)).

What license restriction? I believe any software using ASIO as input must be licensed by Steinberg, if that's what you're talking about.

jwt27 wrote:

What license restriction? I believe any software using ASIO as input must be licensed by Steinberg, if that's what you're talking about.

Oh no, I meant how M-Audio artificially caps/limits the ganging capabilities of their interfaces so that they don't make Digidesign look bad.

obobskivich wrote:

Dreamer_of_the_past wrote:

Get Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium HD + Corsair SP2500 and feel the difference.

I remember hearing a lot about those speakers before they came out, and now it seems like they've vanished. Any impressions in real-world use?

Hm, how can I describe it...Let's put it that way, those are the best computer speakers I've ever had in my life. As a matter of fact, I wanted to buy a second pair, but I guess it's too late. Something to be aware of is that a decent discrete sound card is required. Well, if it's discontinued it could mean that Corsair has a new model.