# Audio features in Vista



## Guest (Aug 22, 2006)

There's an interesting post over in AVSforum by Microsoft's Amirm about the new audio features in Vista.

He writes about built in bass management, digital room correction, loudness equalization, headphone virtualization, and channel control tools.

Just thought some people here might also be interested. Here's a copy of his post:



> *Audio Processing in Vista Explained*
> Some of you know about me and our activities in audio/video compression and HD optical formats such as HD DVD. But probably don’t know about other types of signal processing that my team does at Microsoft. To remedy that , here is high level description of audio processing which is included in Windows Vista.
> 
> Some of you know about expensive room correction hardware which in some cases, costs as much as $10,000. Well, in Vista, we have a perceptually tuned version of room correction. Because we don't expect everyone to own an instrumentation microphone, we have designed it so that you can use a cheap cardioid or omnidirectional microphone costing a few dollars to do an excellent job. IF you have a more expensive microphone, you can calibrate your room very accurately. All of this is implemented in in-box Vista software, using less than 5% on 3GHz CPU. Our room correction will equalize frequency response, time delay, and gain between all of your main channels, as well as build a first-reflection-cancellation filter if one or more of your speakers are near a reflective surface. If you do have a high-quality microphone, the room correction system will also flatten the overall frequency response and adjust the subwoofer delay accordingly. All of our adjustments are done as to capture the most obvious problems from the point of view of human hearing, allowing us to do a very effective job with a few machine cycles.
> ...


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## Sonnie (Apr 11, 2006)

Hi Gregg and welcome to the Shack!

Wow! That's an impressive review of the those features. I don't understand a lot of it, but if I'm reading right, it looks like Vista might be the ticket for those with HTPC systems.


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## khellandros66 (Jun 7, 2006)

IIRC these will be part of their new Media Center Edition

I have the first beta (not the MCE) and haven't seen these functions.

~Bob


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## Guest (Aug 25, 2006)

khellandros66 said:


> IIRC these will be part of their new Media Center Edition
> 
> I have the first beta (not the MCE) and haven't seen these functions.
> 
> ~Bob


According to Amir, we won't see this until RC1.


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## khellandros66 (Jun 7, 2006)

I see thats cool so I guess all versions of Vista will have these or most of these features.

~Bob


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## Guest (Aug 27, 2006)

Hmm all this room equalization could be pretty sweet. To take advantage of it though you would have to run all of your system through Vista. They'll need to bring out some new gear to make that happen. For instance, I'm looking forward to the new HD cable card support in Vista. That could feature could really make MCE worth while.


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## Guest (Sep 6, 2006)

There's also a more detailed review over at the Windows Vista Team Blog called Audio Innovations in Windows Vista.


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## Omnius (Aug 26, 2006)

I am very excited about this, and hope they did make it into RC1 so I can try to play with them soon. I've been wanting to do full multi-channel room correction for a while now, but there hasn't been anything I could use on my MCE based HTPC. I was just about to give up and start trying to figure out how to develop it myself. I am a computer scientist, but all this signal processing stuff is about as far away from my specialty as you can get... so I wasn't looking forward to trying it.


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## jagman (Jul 8, 2006)

How much will a decent HTPC with Vista cost? I read through the AVS link and it seems like all you need is a high end Video card. I'm just wondering about the digital audio outs. It seems like MSFT doesn't process or pass through most of the newer audio formats supported by HD-DVD (version 2.0). Seems odd since MSFT is one of their biggest supporters. Makes you wonder.


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## Guest (Oct 10, 2006)

jagman said:


> How much will a decent HTPC with Vista cost? I read through the AVS link and it seems like all you need is a high end Video card. I'm just wondering about the digital audio outs. It seems like MSFT doesn't process or pass through most of the newer audio formats supported by HD-DVD (version 2.0). Seems odd since MSFT is one of their biggest supporters. Makes you wonder.


Microsoft doesn't/didn't process Dolby Digital (DD) or DTS (Digital Theater Systems) encoded audio either. The decoding or passing of this data is handled by the software players like Intervideo's WinDVD or Cyberlink's PowerDVD. The same will probably be true with the new audio formats for HD-DVD and Blu-ray.


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