News Janet Jackson's 'Rhythm Nation' would still be crashing hard drives without this audio processing filter

[Admin]

An audio filter introduced in Windows XP is still around to protect your PC today from Janet Jackson.

Janet Jackson's 'Rhythm Nation' would still be crashing hard drives without this audio processing filter : Read more

 

[bit_user]

Okay, so the first question is why the "fix" wasn't contained to the audio driver for the particular laptop, or at least the sound chip it used.

An even better solution would be for the driver stack to contain processing plugins that could be installed as part of the manufacturer's driver package, so that you only get the filtering when installing the drivers for a particular model.

Something else they could've done was to implement the filtering in hardware, either as a dedicated notch filter circuit or via custom firmware loaded into the the playback chip. In fact, I'll bet modern chipsets probably have a custom Eq curve manufacturers can pre-configure, so you get better sound quality from their integrated speakers.

Thankfully, the software giant gave it an exception. This means the APO stopping Janet Jackson from crippling a laptop now runs permanently, even if you turned off all audio enhancements on your Windows PC.

What I can say about that is my audio playback on Windows 7, I think probably using VLC, would play bit-perfect out my Toslink port. I know this, because when I'd play HDCD bitstreams, my DAC would detect them. This doesn't happen if there's any processing, at all.

 

[Tbonius]

When this was first reported back in the day, I tried my damnedest to replicate it but alas I couldn't.

 

[SoNic67]

Okay, so the first question is why the "fix" wasn't contained to the audio driver for the particular laptop, or at least the sound chip it used.

An even better solution would be for the driver stack to contain processing plugins that could be installed as part of the manufacturer's driver package, so that you only get the filtering when installing the drivers for a particular model.

Something else they could've done was to implement the filtering in hardware, either as a dedicated notch filter circuit or via custom firmware loaded into the the playback chip. In fact, I'll bet modern chipsets probably have a custom Eq curve manufacturers can pre-configure, so you get better sound quality from their integrated speakers.


What I can say about that is my audio playback on Windows 7, I think probably using VLC, would play bit-perfect out my Toslink port. I know this, because when I'd play HDCD bitstreams, my DAC would detect them. This doesn't happen if there's any processing, at all.

Different audio path, not using the Windows system mixer.

 

[Alex/AT]

That's basically why windows sound output is so much shit and you should get ASIO-compatible sound card and use ASIO for playback. Or use bit-perfect encoded streams output to rely on external decoders but this does not apply to i.e. MP3 playback in your favorite player.
(given you want any decent sound quality of course)