mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

Windows 7 has a "loudness equalization" feature under its audio enhancements, which effectively amounts to dynamic range compression.

It's a sound card driver feature, not Windows 7.

I haven't noticed this either, are you talking about an option like this?

Yes that's the setting Keropi 😀

The Recon 3D and newer cards have a slider and some options to control the behaviour of the compressor.

Here is me converting this feature in my Sound blaster Z review: http://youtu.be/fgmqqPhGSWA?t=9m22s

It is extremely hand late at night, for notebooks that are already quiet, for making everything audible because many YouTube people don't boost their audio signal properly.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Yes that's the setting Keropi :) […]
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Yes that's the setting Keropi 😀

The Recon 3D and newer cards have a slider and some options to control the behaviour of the compressor.

Here is me converting this feature in my Sound blaster Z review: http://youtu.be/fgmqqPhGSWA?t=9m22s

It is extremely hand late at night, for notebooks that are already quiet, for making everything audible because many YouTube people don't boost their audio signal properly.

The driver CP there looks almost identical to my Recon3D - Recon3D says "THX" instead of "SBX" though. Same settings/options though. Who knows... 🤣

On both cards (X-Fi and Recon3D) it's indeed useful for late at night, watching some movies/TV shows, etc on the PC. I honestly don't remember if my Audigy 2 ZS has this feature - if I remember I can look through its 7000 control panels the next time I boot that system up.

OS-wide AGC problems seem to be soundcard driver specific, or in some cases introduced by sneaky additional mixer/control panel apps (e.g. Dell, THX TruStudio).

http://forums.logitech.com/t5/Headphones-Head … rol/td-p/705090
http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/fo … 29-7577f0efa549

archsan wrote:

OS-wide AGC problems seem to be soundcard driver specific, or in some cases introduced by sneaky additional mixer/control panel apps (e.g. Dell, THX TruStudio).

http://forums.logitech.com/t5/Headphones-Head … rol/td-p/705090
http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/fo … 29-7577f0efa549

The only other thing that comes to mind is if Windows is detecting "communication activity" (some flash content will erroneously engage this because it asks for way too many privileges) - the default behavior is to lower other sounds. It makes sense for VoIP but otherwise has little purpose. You can disable it entirely in the audio options.

The thing I was talking about is something hardcoded into the new Windows Audio, there's no way to turn it off unless Microsoft releases a hotfix for it.

There's a big difference between audio in Windows XP (loud things cause heavy distortion, rectified by making sure your soundcards mixer is set to 0.0 dB for wave and\or master) where as Windows 7, loud things or many loud things being played at once causes dynamic range compression rather than distortion, and it is very messy when that happens.

DracoNihil wrote:

The thing I was talking about is something hardcoded into the new Windows Audio, there's no way to turn it off unless Microsoft releases a hotfix for it.

And you've had something like half a dozen folks tell you they aren't experiencing what you are, and that it's very likely something to do with your configuration, not something "hardcoded into Windows" running amok. There are a number of soundcards, audio drivers, media player applications, etc that will engage DR comp under given circumstances, and in most cases it's for a reason. Yes, Microsoft re-designed the audio system starting with Windows Vista, but Vista, 7, and (I would assume by extension) 8/8.1 are all still capable of clipping and producing a wonderful cacophony of noise (and I'm not sure why you feel DR comp is worse than clipping; clipping is a vbt).

I've had three different systems running Windows 7, two using home premium and this one using fresh windows 7 ultimate. A plethora of drivers, the only time I have never heard this dynamic range compression going on when there's loud or alot of loud audio, is if I'm using ASIO, Kernel Streaming or OpenAL with a creative card. This of course limits to single application only and because it bypasses the windows audio service, if that thing is loud it will distort, it will also clip traditional windows audio where as, if everything was kept on windows audio, the clipping never happens but you get harsh dynamic range compression as it tries to prevent clipping situations.

It is defiantly something to do with windows 7's audio service. There's alot of stuff you can't touch in it. I've even noticed CPU usage in audiodg even with "Disable Enhancements" checked. And this was on two fresh installs... Without even installing a vendor specific driver and making use of microsoft's generic UAA driver.

This is one of the many reasons I wish I could of stayed on Windows XP, but Microsoft sabotages their old OS's all the time, what with Visual Studio not being allowed to target old windows platforms for whatever arbitrary reason other than their whole "planned obsolescence" marketing picket.

On topic though:

I'll be damn surprised if Windows 9 does something right, but so far it just looks like they're playing stupid with their customers. The start menu is one thing, what goes on under the hood is another issue altogether.

I still ask myself, how could they be confused why customers opposed the loss of the start menu and hated the metro interface? Why would someone at microsoft ever come to the conclusion that "nobody used the start menu anymore"? How many people here have you made use of the "Pin to start menu" thing windows 7 added that makes the start menu a hell of alot nicer?

Windows 7 really pushed the start search. Works great. Hit the start button, type exc and press enter and there is your Excel.

But not everyone works like this. When you can't remember what the file or program was called you are stuck. Often people just remember it's on the desktop and is red and blue towards the bottom left corner. People's brains operate differently and to force a user interface onto customers like they did with Windows 8 would normally be corporate suicide.

There were bugs with window 7's start search, but I sometimes wonder if it was just to prevent someone from auto completing a poweruser command.

I still like the pin to startmenu feature. It was the first thing I gotten used to when I first started using windows 7.

DracoNihil wrote:

Why would someone at microsoft ever come to the conclusion that "nobody used the start menu anymore"?

Probably as a result of usage pattern research, focus groups, surveys, and so on. The kind of methods companies usually use to try to improve their products. They don't just make drastic changes like that in a vacuum, the thought of it is just absurd.

Sometimes it backfires (like New Coke), that's just life. It doesn't mean they were "playing stupid", or bore any kind of malice towards their paying customers. Pobody's nerfect.

audiodg.exe sure does something involving audio and having high cpu usage for it. I'm not imagining these things. I know because it did hinder tracking since Windows 7 would scale the volume up as I try to put in some quiet notes.... it did not do this with the same sound hardware on XP.

Once again, I wouldn't blame Windows for that. CPU usage of audiodg.exe always stay at 0% here.

^ yeah same here , tried with winamp+2x YT videos playing at various volumes, audiog was at 0% and consumed ~15.7MB of RAM
I am pretty sure it's an audio driver thing

Firtasik wrote:

Once again, I wouldn't blame Windows for that. CPU usage of audiodg.exe always stay at 0% here.

audiodg is a part of Windows 7, of course Windows can be blamed because that thing is part of Windows 7's "PulseAudio" like audio stack, you can't disable it, you can't totally get it gutted of all software related DSP shenanigans either. Infact I one time decided to see what would happen if you forcefully killed it's task and I got a BSOD, this was during playing multiple streams of audio.

Of course if you disable all your audio devices, you can still use ASIO, Kernel Streaming and Hardware OpenAL as it doesn't go through the windows audio architecture anyways. Though getting it to use OpenAL can be a bit of a trick because disabling a audio output is akin to disabling a entire soundcard, which is a stupid design flaw with Windows 7's audio architecture. And most programs freak out and think you don't have a soundcard rather than trying to enumerate it without looking at the Windows 7 mixer status. (i.e. probe the actual device manager or something)

-^ and what happens if a driver abuses the windows audio subsystem, or has a bug or is not well written and noone cares to fix it? It's a possibility since apparently not everyone faces the issue in question

What happens if the driver is Microsoft's own driver that's embedded in Windows 7? Like I said, I've observed audiodg problems with the stock driver Microsoft wrote as part of their UAA specification.

I still stand by my word it is Microsoft and thus Windows's fault why these audiodg problems exist. Also depending on your CPU, you might not beable with traditional taskmanager to notice any CPU usage in audiodg.

Well, I have a single opinion when it comes to Windows' audio subsystem for any serious audio use: don't use it.
I also have a single opinion when it comes to audio interface devices without good support and good drivers*: don't use 'em.

Life Just Got Easier(TM) 😀

*that's usually ASIO for Windows, zilch for OSX

DracoNihil wrote:

What happens if the driver is Microsoft's own driver that's embedded in Windows 7? Like I said, I've observed audiodg problems with the stock driver Microsoft wrote as part of their UAA specification.

I still stand by my word it is Microsoft and thus Windows's fault why these audiodg problems exist. Also depending on your CPU, you might not beable with traditional taskmanager to notice any CPU usage in audiodg.

That's still pure speculation without any evidence of a faulty subsystem.
You can't be sure it's not a driver problem or it's not a hardware limitation that makes audiog behaves like that. If you have some crappy onboard audio device and said device wants to "enrich" sound via a software way , or is simply incapable of doing all sound operations on it's own, then ofcourse it will use cpu time via the audio subsystem.
Even if the operation is the "sound leveling" stuff, if you can't turn it off (driver) and you are forced to live with it, and hardware can't do it on it's own then it uses cpu resources as expected.

And define "stock UUA driver" , there is also a "stock SVGA driver" in windows that noone uses or complains about: it's just there to offer basic functionality until a hardware specific driver gets installed.

What hardware devices give you problems and what exactly are you doing when those problems appear?
I just checked my work pc with a Q9300 and onboard realtek audio on an ASUS P45 mobo with MS's driver (or whatever driver win7 had for it , I didn't bother to install any driver in my work pc for audio) and audiog is stuck at 0% whatever you do.
Even on my intel Atom mITX board with crappy onboard realtek chip (but with drivers installed) audiog uses 0%, tried playing 3 yt videos at different volume levels , it brought the machine to a crawl but audiog's max cpu time was 1% for some 0.5 seconds... 😐