Non Haiku - silly audio driver issue on Win11

Off-Topic
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Hi everyone. Sorry for being off topic. Just venting …

Last month I got a new all AMD laptop for work (and for Haiku), and encountered the weirdest audio latency issue out of the box on Windows 11. It’s not noticeable for music, but it is very noticeable for real time content. In the end, after hours of investigating potential culprits, the issue was with a really obscure (hard to find) audio setting called “Enable Audio Enhancements” (either Realtek or Microsoft caused). Disabling the setting fixed the latency issue. The hunting for preferences and help is really poor for a mainstream OS, and the nature of that setting shows how they disregard customers.

Any person with a pair of ears on their head knows that post processing distorts the original audio, yet some organisations think that by default they should distort the sound to make the laptop sound better, typically paired with cheap speakers / headphones. The definition of sounds better is arguable.

There are likewise, dozens of weird preferences for all hardware/software, which in all honesty, a typical user does not need. I typically disable all bling / post processing / animations and everything which actually interferes with my enjoyment of the product. Haiku by default is configured exactly how I want it (minus Tracker spatial navigation) :slight_smile:

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I’m more surprised that ASIO or whatever didn’t bypass the enhancements engine…

I don’t think that they’re disregarding customers here; rather they’re trying to make their product “pop” on the store shelves and appear desirable to (hopefully) the average non-technical customer - with the most saturated colors, loudest bass, etc. When working with precision audio though, these do get in the way.

I have an EQ in my sound pipeline to correct my terrible laptop speaker’s response (using a measurement I made on the cheap - hey, at least it’s better than nothing!). In this case. I’m actually un-distorting the sound, in a sense. I’m using Pipewire, so it’s easy to keep latency below the 50ms mark. The PulseAudio version of that was over 100ms and boy was that noticeable.

I kind of like some subtle visual and sound effects? They help “put the fun back in computing” and occasionally help with understanding the space in a skeuomorphic-like way.