First post, by MrKsoft
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I never see this mentioned about the AudioPCI so I thought I would make a thread about it. I've noticed that using an ES1371 with the VXD drivers results in very crisp and clear MIDI, whereas the WDM driver results in a more compressed/filtered sound as if it's downsampled to 22050hz or something.
I've recorded a MIDI from Sonic & Knuckles collection to demonstrate the difference. Both from the same machine but with VXD vs WDM:
The WDM driver also seems to default to having reverb on the MIDI synth which muddies things up even more (above recording is with that disabled in the mixer to rule out the reverb as the cause of the quality loss). I do like the sound of the ECW instrument sets, so it would be nice to be able to use them more. The cards are decent enough for builds where you either don't have ISA slots or are using a separate sound card for legacy support -- but being able to use the WDM drivers without sacrificing MIDI quality would be beneficial since you could use Win2K if desired, and under 98/ME can ditch the legacy support and have improved CD audio support for virtual drives in Daemon Tools (the VXDs are especially annoying to work with for that)
Anyone know if there is a configuration fix perhaps, or maybe a specific version that works better... or are the WDM drivers just crap? I find it hard to believe this has never come up.
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