Full description parameters, as well as instructions for setting up the built-in sound Realtek cards. Setting playback, recording, 3D sound. Windows Vista/7/8

2012-02-17T18:19

2012-02-17T18:19

Audiophile's Software

Copyright 2017, Taras Kovrijenko

Full or partial copying of the text is allowed only with the written permission of the author.

Prologue

This time I will touch on a topic that is relevant, so to speak, for beginner enthusiasts - that is, for those who have not yet got hold of a discrete sound card and want to get the most out of an integrated one.

1. Educational program

To begin with, a brief educational program. Who does not know, or does not fully understand what is hardware audio codec, carefully read the relevant Wikipedia pages:

Have you read? Excellent! And now it would be even very nice if you read my two articles:

Well, now we can start.

2. What we have

So, at my disposal is Windows 7 SP1 Ultimate x64 (the setting described in the article is suitable for all operating systems, starting with Vista), built-in motherboard(ASUS P7H55-V) ALC887 codec (datasheet available), external amplifier and microphone connected to the rear connectors (green and pink sockets, respectively). Please note that we will configure the output card stereo sound by analog interface.

3. Software installation

First of all, you need to install the drivers. Of course, most likely Windows has already found and installed the drivers for the sound device itself, however, in order to gain access to all the functionality, as well as for peace of mind, we will install the driver package directly from Realtek, latest version which you can download on the corresponding page of my website. By the way, the settings specified here were checked on the R2.67 driver version.

Download the drivers, perform a simple installation procedure (by running HD_Audio/Setup.exe), restart the computer.

After loading the OS, a brown speaker icon should appear in the system tray:

4. Driver settings

First of all, let's go to Windows Control Panel->Hardware and Sound->Sound and, making sure that our headphones or speakers are connected to the green socket of the sound card, we turn off everything unnecessary devices, and make our connected device the default device:

At the same time, we will do the same with recording devices:

Now double click on the tray icon. If there is no icon, we look for it in hidden icons, if it is not there either, we go to Control Panel->Hardware and Sound->. One way or another, the dispatcher window should open:

Here we immediately set the speaker configuration (stereo), set our analog device as the default device (after which the corresponding button will go out), turn off, if, God forbid, it is turned on, surround sound.

By clicking the button in the form of a yellow folder, you can configure disabling the detection of front panel connectors:

Also note that the connected connectors are displayed in bright color - in our case, speakers are connected to the green output, a microphone is connected to the pink input. Here is one very important detail: double-clicking on the connector icon, you will see a window with a choice of the type of connected device. This is important because if you choose "headphones", then the codec will use a special additional amplifier (otherwise the sound in the headphones will be too quiet), for connected active speakers or external amplifiers should choose "Front Speaker Out". Here, the automatic pop-up of this window is also enabled when the device is connected to any of the card slots:

Using the "i" button, you can open a window with information about the driver version, DirectX, audio controller and codec version, and turn on / off the display of the icon in the system tray:

Now turn off the effects:

The “Room correction” settings for the stereo configuration are not available, which is actually strange - in the same console from THX (which is included, for example, in the driver package Creative XFi) you can adjust the distance and angle of the direction of the speakers relative to your position, which is very useful when you are not sitting directly in front of the speakers, or they are not symmetrically located relative to you. Well, okay, let it be on the conscience of the developers.

The last tab duplicates the control panel settings (however, most of the settings from the Dispatcher are also in the control panel):

Here you can set the parameters of the system mixer - with what sampling rate and depth Windows bit will mix all played sounds. Set to 24 bit, 96 kHz. Why - I will tell further.

Since I am constantly bombarded with questions about how to set up a microphone (which, in my opinion, should cause a minimum of confusion), I will still focus on setting up recording devices. Their settings, by the way, as well as playback devices, are on separate tabs at the top of the window. Let's start with the stereo mixer:

Everything is elementary here. This device records everything that you hear through the speakers, i.e., the finished audio stream that Windows sends to the sound card. It is brought to the indicated form (since the mixer works with a sampling frequency of 96 kHz, then we will put the same number here).

But our main recording device is, of course, the microphone:

So, we set the recording volume to the maximum, and turn off the microphone gain (then, if necessary, you can turn it on). Also, very often people complain that they reproduce the sound perceived by the microphone, so that this does not happen - turn off the playback. To your taste - noise filtering, echo cancellation. On the tab , again, the recording format is set:

Considering the characteristics of the recording path, the standard 16 bit/44.1 kHz is enough here.

5. Setting up foobar2000

In principle, the work done is enough to provide the highest (for this card) sound quality in any player. But for the really paranoid, I will give foobar2000 settings. We will need, in fact, the player itself and several plugins for it - WASAPI output support and SoX Resampler. Well, or you can download my assembly, in which everything is already available.

So, in the player output settings (File->Preferences->Playback->Output) select WASAPI:<наше устройство> , bit depth set 24 bit:

When outputting via WASAPI Exclusive, all sound card effects (if they are enabled) are bypassed, as well as the Windows mixer (for which we specified the sample rate).

Now let's move on to the DSP settings:

Here we add the SOund eXchange resampler and Advanced Limiter to the chain. In the settings of the resampler, we set the frequency to 96 kHz.

And now - why 96 kHz. I did a series of experiments and this is what I found out. In the front speaker output mode, if the volume control is set to more than 90%, when playing a test signal udial(sampling frequency - 44.1 kHz) strong distortion is heard. Distortion disappears if you either lower the volume, or switch to headphone mode, or resample the audio to 96 kHz.

It is difficult to judge the reasons for this phenomenon according to the available data, but we can draw conclusions and play it safe twice: output all audio at a sampling rate of 96 kHz, and do not increase the volume to more than 90%.

And a few words about the need to configure foobar2000. In principle, it is possible to output sound to the device "DS: Primary sound driver". In this case, resampling will be performed Windows tools(the resampler is not the worst there), besides, all other sounds will not be turned off (as when playing through WASAPI Exclusive). In addition, choosing this device, Windows will output sound to the device that is set by default in the control panel, which can be convenient (for example, when you turn off one of the devices, the sound automatically switches to another). So the choice is yours - convenience, or confidence in quality.

6. The resurrection of 3D sound and hardware mixing

And of course, I haven't forgotten about the gamers. Since in Windows, starting from Vista, there is no access to hardware stream mixing (all operations are performed by Windows, and then a single stream is output to the sound card), the developers came up with special program, similar to Creative ALchemy, but for Realtek - 3D SoundBack. It connects to hardware resources through the OpenAL interface, emulating for the specified Windows programs emulates a DirectSound device (like in Windows XP), and then simply converts DirectSound (or DirectSound 3D) commands to OpenAL commands, resulting in true EAX 2.0 in games, as well as the ability to convert multi-channel audio to stereo with ambient effects.

To run the program, open the folder .../Program Files/Realtek/3D Sound Back Beta0.1, in file properties 3DSoundBack.exe tab "Compatibility" install Windows Vista SP2 compatibility mode:

Now run this file. To add an application - click AddGame, enter the name and address of the folder containing the program's executable file. For example:

After adding, do not forget to select the added application and click the button enable.

Now the specified application will use the emulated DirectSound device by default and will have access to the hardware resources of the sound card:

Epilogue

Well, another grandiose article is completed. By the way, I was thinking: in a good way, this article should have been written one of the first ... However, at that time I still would not have had enough knowledge to describe everything in such detail, so it could be the best.

If something is not clear, there are some questions - ask, comment. Good luck!

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If you have headphones with a microphone and speakers, it's tempting to connect both of these devices and use them depending on the time of day without having to constantly plug and unplug.
If your audio system supports multi-channel audio (most often, Realtek HD Audio is used everywhere now) - this is not difficult to do. The solution is to switch the computer's audio system to multi-channel (quadraphonic) mode and reassign the properties of the connectors on the computer through the audio driver settings panel.

I'll show you how to do it, using the example of the most popular operating system Windows XP. In Windows 7 and 8, everything is just as simple.

Modern desktop computers (desktops) usually have three audio jacks on the back and two on the front. Often the connectors on the front panel are not connected and we will not consider them.

On the rear panel, the connectors have different colors:
blue - line input;
green - line output (headphone output);
red - microphone input.

First of all, go to the Control Panel and click the "Sound and Audio System" button (on other operating systems, just "Sound"). Select the tab or "Audio" and in it "Sound playback". You can quickly get to this place by pressing right click click on the system gray speaker icon at the bottom right of the clock panel and select "Audio Settings".

Then launch the Realtek HD Sound Manager by right-clicking on the orange speaker icon in the panel next to the clock and selecting "Sound Manager". Click on the wrench button in the "Audio I/O" tab and check the "Enable automatic popup dialog for turned on device" checkbox. Now, when you plug the cables into the audio jacks, the system will prompt you to choose what exactly you plugged in there. You also need to select from the drop-down list "4CH speaker" above the picture of testing the audio system.

Then, in turn, connect the green headphone jack to the green jack of the computer, the red microphone jack to the red jack of the computer, and the audio cable of the speakers to the blue jack of the computer (speakers do not need to be turned on yet). At the same time, in the pop-up window, indicate with a checkmark which device you connected.
For the green connector, select "headphone out", for the blue one - "output to the front speakers" (you can vice versa), and for the red one - "mic input".

That's all! Now you can check - the sound will come from both speakers and headphones at the same time! In the evening, the speakers can be turned off without disconnecting them from the computer. Happy listening!

Instruction

Line-in is usually enabled by default, and if you do not hear sound when you connect a device, then you need to make sure of the following:

Are the drivers installed on yours?

Is the line-in set to line-in (for some sound card utilities)?

Is it output in the mixer?

As for the drivers, they must be supplied on a disk with a sound card, or be pre-installed on yours (if it is new). Otherwise, you need to find out the sound card model and download required driver from the Internet.

For some equipment, along with drivers, special utilities are advanced analogues of the Windows mixer. Take Realtek for example. In such cases, you need to run this program and see if the line input is activated. The shortcut for this program is usually located in the system tray next to the clock. In the settings window that opens, check the box or click the “enable” button next to the line input icon (blue input). After that, it should turn on. In the same program, open the mixer or go to the appropriate settings section. Here you need to look for the volume control corresponding to the line input to be raised. Otherwise, pick it up.

If you do not have additional utilities installed, or you do not know how to run them, you can use the system mixer. It is located at:
For Windows XP: Start > Settings > Control Panel > Sounds and Audio Devices > tab: Volume > Advanced…

The system mixer window will open. Find the inscription "Lin. input". Below it you will see a volume scale and a checkbox with the inscription "Off". The checkbox next to this inscription must be removed, and the volume slider should be moved to the volume level you need.
For Windows 7: Start > Control Panel > Hardware and Sound > under "Sound" click: "volume adjustment". Next, under the inscription "Line input" raise the volume slider to the required level.

Sources:

• Recording guitar through line-in

The line-in port on a computer audio device is primarily used for connecting microphones. Its configuration is carried out without the use of any special utilities.

Instruction

Make sure the driver for your sound card has been properly installed. To do this, open the hardware installation wizard, if your sound adapter does not appear in devices without software, then everything was installed correctly.

If the wizard prompts you to install the device driver, insert the disc containing software to the drive, or specify the path to the folder with the drivers on the hard drive. You can also use an internet connection. After installing the driver, restart your computer.

Find on your sound card connector for connecting a microphone, usually it has an icon with the corresponding image or is signed with the abbreviation mic. Connect your device to it, check it working condition and make the line input setting. To do this, open the Sounds and Audio Devices control panel menu.