Drivers make a huge difference in terms of how your hardware interacts and runs with the rest of your system. In this day and age when the humble home PC is becoming all but the center piece of your entertainment system and the entertainment hub and basically handling everything thrown at it from Blu-Ray video to lossless music in the form of FLAC and/or WAV files, the PC not only equals but performs way better too.
Audio Stream Input/Output (ASIO) is driver protocol for a computer’s soundcard and specifically for digital audio. It basically acts as a go between the soundcard and the software on the PC. It’s a driver (device driver) that lets programs to interact with hardware like a soundcard, LAN card, graphics card, etc. Very obviously drivers are provided by the hardware manufacturers themselves as otherwise it would be impossible for the hardware to work without the drivers, but not always do the hardware manufacturers provide the right drivers or drivers that work best. A case in point would be the Asus soundcards, the drivers provided by Asus (ASUSTeK Computer Inc.) actually kind of suck. I’ve had trouble getting HD Audio to work in fact. Similarly Creative’s ASIO drivers too suck most of the time IMHO. Another option would be that the hardware you have i.e. specifically the soundcard you have is maybe an older model and not having a digital output. ASIO is specifically for digital audio. In such a scenario what is one to do? Well not to fret for ASIO4ALL is here to the rescue. As the name clearly implies ASIO4ALL means exactly that i.e. ASIO for all. The ASIO4ALL drivers once installed and up and running on your system will raise the sound quality (SQ) on your PC to pure audiophile quality. They in fact perform way better than the default ASIO drivers provided by the hardware manufacturers. Also, they provide a workaround for soundcards that do not have a digital output option (obviously older generation soundcards). This is particularly important in case you are using or intending to use a program or a player like cPlay to play music on your system which will work only with an ASIO compatible soundcard. The perfect workaround to get such media players working is to install ASIO4ALL and you are done.
Even otherwise ASIO4ALL will deliver excellent sound quality even on such players like XMPlay and Foobar2000. It in fact beats Kernel Streaming in Foobar2000 hands down. Please do note that I’ve only tried ASIO4ALL with Windows XP and not given it a spin on Windows Vista yet. For Windows Vista I’ve tried WASAPI and that works excellent too. However, coming back to ASIO4ALL the sound I can say is pristine and in fact audiophile quality. Of course to achieve audiophile quality a lot has to go into it in terms of software, hardware, speakers, and even the kind of music played (MP3 rips are not going to achieve audiophile quality if you know what I mean) but ASIO4ALL does go a long way in ensuring that audiophile quality is reached. Even for cards that do come with ASIO support ASIO4ALL shows its superiority is delivering way better SQ (sound quality).
Getting ASIO4ALL to work is a cinch. Just download the file from http://www.asio4all.com/ and install the file. That’s it, it will be up and running immediately. Configure your media player to use ASIO4ALL for its output and you can also configure any additional settings from sample rate to latency compensation all of which is way too easy. ASIO4ALL will also display all the enabled soundcards as well as the onboard soundcard so you can configure each one individually. Just download ASIO4ALL and give it a spin. I can personally assure you that it will have a permanent place on your PC and also all of your music will sound way better and pristine, just so much that you will begin to hear anew. Don’t blame me if you end up listening to all of your music once again.
Oh, this is great news about ASIO4ALL, I will try it today itself.