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The first thing we noticed was that for all the bells and whistles found in Intel Audio Studio (IAS) and in Realteks own audio control panel, neither application has a mixer in it to replace Microsofts clunky old standard mixer applet. Also known as the kernel mixer (Kmixer), this applet is very long in the tooth and its UI has needed a serious face lift for many moons. Granted, the mixer is a Microsoft application since its part of the OS, but any Windows audio hardware worth its salt gives you a better mixer than the one Windows provides by default.
Microsoft actually brought forth a new audio architecture in the OS to make way for Intels HD Audio had a hand in developing HD Audios OS interfaces. This new architecture, called Universal Audio Architecture (UAA), is intended to enable HD Audio and provide more robust audio interfaces for FireWire- and USB-based audio devices. According to Microsoft, UAAs goals are:
While these are all laudable goals, we still wish a new and improved mixer application had made its way into the feature list as well.
You Dont Know Jack
One of HD Audios most visible features is its jack-sensing technology, which ensures you make the proper connections to the growing number of output and input jacks that now populate back panels of motherboard-down audio solutions. Realteks implementation fares pretty well, where the driver senses a jack insertion event by "listening" for impedance changes in the jack.
Each time we plugged in a line-input or line-output, wed be prompted by the Realtek control panel app to verify that what we plugged in was in the correct jack. After about the fifth prompt, this implementation, though well-intentioned, started to get annoying. Weve seen smarter implementations from Analog Devices and SigmaTel that not only sense a change in impedance in the jack, but also can distinguish the amount of change in impedance and figure out whether a line-input or a microphone was just plugged in. They can also distinguish between a line-output and a pair of headphones. So even if you plug an input or output into the wrong jack, the driver can re-patch channels to ensure the wiring configuration, even if erroneous, will still work.
Next page: Intel Audio Studio
- Simpler installation of audio peripherals
- Higher performance: Minimum CPU time consumed when streaming, while taking advantage of increased bandwidth
- Glitch-free audio
- Ability to update the operating system while guaranteeing high-quality audio performance
- More stable and secure audio for server applications
- Fewer drivers and upgrades required and less driver code to be developed, tested and supported
- Reduction in support calls and returns
