Computer sound settings

[Colin Pykett]

Warning - a diversion for audio nerds coming up here:

I've just come across yet another instance of the default sound settings on computers (or other devices such as tablets) going in exactly the opposite direction to what most right-minded people would consider to be high fidelity.  For some reason I've never been able to discover, manufacturers of sound chips or sound cards seem unable to resist meddling with the signal you want to listen to.  A common and typically egregious example concerns headphone listening - if your device thinks you are using headphones, which is usually the default option on a device when you buy it, you can bet good money that something more or less awful will be done to the sound before you hear it.  I've been struggling to identify the source of gross distortion, which sounds like clipping, on a recording of Guilmant's Pastorale from his Sonata number 1 in D minor.   The distortion occurs whenever the 32 foot flue stop comes on while accompanying the Vox Humana.  Although subjectively very quiet, the recorded signal amplitude at these points is admittedly very high owing to the low frequency flue, but I know full well that there's no clipping because I made the flippin' recording myself!   So what's going on?  It's not just a question of simply adjusting the volume because the distortion occurred with any combination of gain settings.

Playing the same recording on different machines, when there was no distortion, confirmed that it only occurred on a Windows 10 laptop with some sort of Realtek sound system.  Lo and behold, poking around within the sound settings finally revealed a tab labelled 'Advanced' which had a box showing that something called 'Enable audio enhancements' was ticked.  So I unticked it.  (It's always worth looking into anything called Advanced).  Elsewhere I found another tab labelled 'Spatial sound' where something else called 'Windows Sonic for Headphones' was enabled.  So I killed that as well.  Finally I changed the output device to 'External speakers' from 'Headphones' - this seemed the closest match to what I was actually doing (feeding the signal from the output jack into an external hifi amplifier).

Result: perfection.

Moral: go through your sound settings with a tooth comb and kill everything that you don't understand or need.

Rant over.  I'm now heading for the cupboard containing that single malt I'd forgotten about ...

[P DeVile]

On 04/11/2023 at 15:11, Colin Pykett said:

Warning - a diversion for audio nerds coming up here:

I've just come across yet another instance of the default sound settings on computers (or other devices such as tablets) going in exactly the opposite direction to what most right-minded people would consider to be high fidelity.  For some reason I've never been able to discover, manufacturers of sound chips or sound cards seem unable to resist meddling with the signal you want to listen to.  A common and typically egregious example concerns headphone listening - if your device thinks you are using headphones, which is usually the default option on a device when you buy it, you can bet good money that something more or less awful will be done to the sound before you hear it.  I've been struggling to identify the source of gross distortion, which sounds like clipping, on a recording of Guilmant's Pastorale from his Sonata number 1 in D minor.   The distortion occurs whenever the 32 foot flue stop comes on while accompanying the Vox Humana.  Although subjectively very quiet, the recorded signal amplitude at these points is admittedly very high owing to the low frequency flue, but I know full well that there's no clipping because I made the flippin' recording myself!   So what's going on?  It's not just a question of simply adjusting the volume because the distortion occurred with any combination of gain settings.

Playing the same recording on different machines, when there was no distortion, confirmed that it only occurred on a Windows 10 laptop with some sort of Realtek sound system.  Lo and behold, poking around within the sound settings finally revealed a tab labelled 'Advanced' which had a box showing that something called 'Enable audio enhancements' was ticked.  So I unticked it.  (It's always worth looking into anything called Advanced).  Elsewhere I found another tab labelled 'Spatial sound' where something else called 'Windows Sonic for Headphones' was enabled.  So I killed that as well.  Finally I changed the output device to 'External speakers' from 'Headphones' - this seemed the closest match to what I was actually doing (feeding the signal from the output jack into an external hifi amplifier).

Result: perfection.

Moral: go through your sound settings with a tooth comb and kill everything that you don't understand or need.

Rant over.  I'm now heading for the cupboard containing that single malt I'd forgotten about ...

Or get a Mac.....!

[pwhodges]

Or use a proper audio interface on Windows.

Paul

[Peter Allison]

7 hours ago, pwhodges said:

Or use a proper audio interface on Windows.

Paul

I use a Matrix Audio SPDIF. It takes the signal from PC (NUC) via an expensive silver USB, to the SPDIF, where it converts the signal to i2S and takes it to the Dac>power amps) speakers and twin subs, where it plays in either the original PCM or DSD recorded track. So in essence it bypasses the windows sounds app 100%

[SomeChap]

16 hours ago, P DeVile said:

Or get a Mac.....!

That is possibly the answer for some people! 

It's not just about audio though: Dr Pykett's point often stands for any software on any OS.  The 'Advanced' tab always contains settings which someone on the software development team would rather you didn't play with (presumably either because they think you're not clever enough, or it's a feature dear to their heart and they can't bear the thought of you disabling it) but someone else has told them they have to expose the option to you, so they've tried to hide it somewhere obscure.  Never neglect the 'Advanced' tab!

Macs are definitely right for some, particularly in the sphere of media editing, though you're buying a conspicuous consumption brand and the accompanying price tag is correspondingly eye-watering.    Personally I've had a bad experience with the analogue audio output on a mac I once owned (and I've no intention of buying another), but I do concede that our friends over at the Hauptwerk forum do generally seem to have a better experience with Macs than with PCs for their use case, which is not dissimilar to Dr Pykett's.

If sticking to Windoze, then the suggestion to use an external sound card (usually connected via USB, though SPDIF will work in certain use cases) is an excellent one (and one that the Hauptwerkians will be able to tell you all about; my knowledge of the best models is very out-of-date, but good brands include Behringer, M-Audio, PreSonus and Focusrite among others).  They will come with good drivers which bypass the nonsense that W10 (and its consumer audio device chums) applies to audio.

And if you want decent audio performance with PC price tags but without the Microsoft OS then there's always Ubuntu Studio, but that's not a rabbit hole that I've personally yet screwed up the courage to go down (even though I use Linux a lot), so that's a suggestion rather than a recommendation!

[Colin Pykett]

When you buy a retail PC or similar device, its audio system is mainly aimed at, and set up for, gamers rather than the minority who want to listen to classical music (and the even smaller minority who want organ music).  So the trappings mentioned in my original post such as 'Enable audio enhancements' and 'Windows sonic for headphones' (gamers tend to use phones rather than big expensive speaker set-ups) are intended to distort the audio signals deliberately to enhance the 'immersive experience' that the games provide when listened to through headphones.  But they do terrible damage to music signals in the process, which becomes noticeable if the listener has enough discernment to detect it on high quality recordings.  So it is worth trying to bypass all the gamer-related excrescences if you are one of these listeners.  Or to use a better sound system in the first place, as other posts above have suggested.

[Choir Man]

I had similar issues in 2020 when I first started running a lockdown choir and was using Audacity to mix home recordings from different choir members. Playback quality was initailly awful! Following advice from the Audacity user community I made similar tweaks to Windows settings and acheived a significant improvement.

However, when I realised that this venture was going to be a long term effort, I got an external sound module. The difference in quality was, and still is, phenomenal even compared against the tweaked settings. This is the case whether using Audacity, streaming YT vdeos from the better channels, or playing media stored on my PC.

Without repeating Colin's excellent explanation, the small headphone socket on any computer and the drivers that sit behind it, are never going to deliver true HiFi quality. I agree that the problems aren't as bad with Macs, but fundamentally the problem will still be thre. If you are looking for HiFi quality you really need an external audio interface (or separate sound card if you have a desktop PC) with 'proper' audio output sockets.