Sound Drivers...

[AngelCityOutlaw]

So, from what I gather via Google, this a pretty common problem (mainly among people using FL Studio) but not a damn thread I've read just gives a solution to the problem.

ASIO4ALL Drivers vs Primary Sound Driver. Upon playback, ASIO sounds great - primary sound driver sounds like ass. So, when I export something, I assume that the primary sound driver plays it back. Therefore, I deduce that this is why it sounds worse when windows media plays the file back versus real-time in the DAW. I've even tried switching in real-time between the ASIO driver and primary driver while the track plays back in FL studio and there is a very noticeable difference in sound.

Why does this happen and how do I fix it?

[Nabeel Ansari]

I have never noticed any sound difference between Primary Sound Driver and ASIO4ALL. There also theoretically should not be a difference.

Can you post mp3's or something?

[Ivan Hakštok]

I have never noticed any sound difference between Primary Sound Driver and ASIO4ALL. There also theoretically should not be a difference.

This. The difference should only be in optimization/speed.

[AngelCityOutlaw]

I have never noticed any sound difference between Primary Sound Driver and ASIO4ALL. There also theoretically should not be a difference.

Can you post mp3's or something?

Well, I can't explain it, but it's happening.

I would share an Mp3 but I'm not sure what good it would do since it's not a problem with the rendered file. Like, if I load the .wav or mp3 into FL Studio, it sounds just fine as long as I use the ASIO drivers. Switch to primary sound drivers and I definitely get a lot more bass...I thought that maybe media players or the sound driver itself had some sort of EQ turned on but I checked and that is not the case.

[Mak Eightman]

Well, I can't explain it, but it's happening.

I would share an Mp3 but I'm not sure what good it would do since it's not a problem with the rendered file. Like, if I load the .wav or mp3 into FL Studio, it sounds just fine as long as I use the ASIO drivers. Switch to primary sound drivers and I definitely get a lot more bass...I thought that maybe media players or the sound driver itself had some sort of EQ turned on but I checked and that is not the case.

Check sound mixer(Primary SD). Sometimes it has effects. I have to ask, why don't you just use your ASIO as primary sd? Or do you mean windows sd as a "primary"? Anyway switch drivers is all you need i think.

edit: Also check daw audio functions. I have no idea how fl works, so can't say anything. But in my daw I can choose between Windows Wave, 5.1, asio, usb digital, usb interface, D sound(or something).. I don't remember them all.

Edited January 14, 2014 by Mak Eightman

[timaeus222]

You can use a program like TapeIt to record what's playing in FL.

There really shouldn't be a difference in sound, and I've never heard even the slightest bit of difference at all, so something else is up. Maybe your sound output is using a driver that has certain aspects of the Windows built-in sound "enhancement" enabled. Make sure all of those are off on all drivers, not just the one you're using. Scroll down, too. There are more than 4.

Edited January 14, 2014 by timaeus222

[Moseph]

Maybe your sound output is using a driver that has certain aspects of the Windows built-in sound "enhancement" enabled. Make sure all of those are off on all drivers, not just the one you're using. Scroll down, too. There are more than 4.

This is my first guess as well. There was a thread pretty recently where someone was having a similar problem, and the default sound enhancements from the built-in sound device turned out to be the culprit.

[AngelCityOutlaw]

So I tried all of the ideas here, plus more that I found elsewhere online. Nothing fixes it.

Strangely, I'm noticing this on other computers as well; my track has more bass when played through the primary driver than the ASIO one...I honestly have no clue why at this point. However, I did notice something. Now keep in mind, this is coming from a sound-production idiot's point of view so maybe this theory will sound stupid, but I notice that in FL studio, when I playback the sound using the primary sound driver and I get all that low end, the waveform up at the top moves a lot slower (as does everything else) than when the ASIO driver is being used. Is this normal or is this evidence of my settings being fucked up somewhere?

[timaeus222]

in FL studio, when I playback the sound using the primary sound driver and I get all that low end, the waveform up at the top moves a lot slower (as does everything else) than when the ASIO driver is being used. Is this normal or is this evidence of my settings being fucked up somewhere?

That's a sign of smoothness of playback. It just means that the playback is less laggy when using ASIO4All, but it does require that you have lots of RAM or else you'll get constant, annoying hiccups in the playback. In contrast, the Primary Sound Driver plays the sound back at a less smooth playback, but instead does NOT hiccup at all, and actually just adds some distortion to the sound as evidence of lagging. Neither situation actually impacts the rendered audio file.

[Nabeel Ansari]

So I tried all of the ideas here, plus more that I found elsewhere online. Nothing fixes it.

Strangely, I'm noticing this on other computers as well; my track has more bass when played through the primary driver than the ASIO one...I honestly have no clue why at this point. However, I did notice something. Now keep in mind, this is coming from a sound-production idiot's point of view so maybe this theory will sound stupid, but I notice that in FL studio, when I playback the sound using the primary sound driver and I get all that low end, the waveform up at the top moves a lot slower (as does everything else) than when the ASIO driver is being used. Is this normal or is this evidence of my settings being fucked up somewhere?

The way computer sound works is that it audio is calculated in samples at a sampling frequency. Let's say 44.1Khz. That means there will be 44100 values of amplitude calculated to be 1 second of sound, and the computer knows to go through it that fast because it knows the sampling frequency ("I have to go through all of these in 1 second!"). It's the sampling frequency that turns those long strings of values into sound at the intended frequencies. If the sampling frequency was higher, those values would be run through faster through the computer and sound card, and you'd hear it pitch up (speed of a signal correlates to its frequency breakdown). These values get converted to an analog electric signal through the sound card, and the wired to your speakers. The values at each small point in time are basically the position of the speaker cone, because the speaker is a transducer, converting electrical energy into oscillations that behave exactly the way the electric signal did. Imagine a sine wave on a waveform graph, basically is the same as the speaker cone moving forward and backward in that same smooth fashion. It's the same with complex waveforms, where you have large and small up and down motions on the graph that correlate directly to large and small forward and back motions of the speaker cone.

Now, the computer can calculate samples in small portions and play them back very quickly and reactively ("low latency") or it can process a lot of the sound ahead of time at the expensive of seeing real-time things right away ("high latency"). Because computers naturally process things single-mindedly (just ignore multi core and bear with me for intuitive understanding's sake), processing lots of sound will in turn slow down things in general. The amount of sound, in samples, your computer will process before playback is called the buffer size.

This is why your DAW visualizations get choppy and slow down. The bigger your buffer, the more the computer is sitting there calculating all of the audio values for the next x amount of samples.

When you change your drivers, your computer changes its behavior when calculating these audio values. A buffer size on Primary Sound Driver is not as fast as the equivalent buffer size on an ASIO4ALL driver, which may be inferior to a legitimate sound card's ASIO Driver.

The tradeoff between latency and buffer demonstrates that at lower latencies, your visualizations become smoother, but this is at the expense of amount of sound that has processing power devoted to it. If your buffer size is too low, your audio gets crackles, pops, distortion, etc. If it is too high, the computer takes a while to process things, not responding snappy in visualizations and your clicks in the DAW. The better your processor, the lower buffers you can get without affecting your audio.

To answer the first question, right click on your speaker icon in the lower left of windows. Hit Playback devices and right click on the audio output device you're using. Hit properties and see if there's any tabs like "enhancements". I know that on my laptop, my internal soundcard had some theatre EQ stuff that compressed the shit out of all audio. Turned beautiful mixes into rubbish.

Edited January 15, 2014 by Neblix

[AngelCityOutlaw]

To answer the first question, right click on your speaker icon in the lower left of windows. Hit Playback devices and right click on the audio output device you're using. Hit properties and see if there's any tabs like "enhancements". I know that on my laptop, my internal soundcard had some theatre EQ stuff that compressed the shit out of all audio. Turned beautiful mixes into rubbish.

So I did that, and none of the boxes for any of the effects were checked off. HOWEVER, just for the sake of trying, I clicked "disable all sound effects" and the problem has been solved. I'm guessing my primary sound driver has some built-in sort of EQ that can't just be turned off individually.