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Intro to Kernel Streaming
Kernel Streaming is a small plugin for winamp that will bypass the windows kMixer
(kMixer resamples all sounds sent to your soundcard and lowers their quality)
and sends music data directly to the sound card. This creates a cleaner sound.
Personally, I prefer using Kernel Streaming over the many "Equilizer" programs out there that don't really improve the quality of your sound;
They only provide an artificial enhancement. Kernel Streaming bypasses the kMixer altogether, giving clean and pure sound with no modifications to the output.
Problems with kMixer
There are two distinct problems with kMixer. First, Microsoft says "Kmixer will mix all data...."
Unfortunately, kMixer does just that -- it "mixes" all data even when it doesn't need to. The mixing algorithm as implemented by Microsoft has been shown in many cases to only have a signal to noise ratio of about 92dB.
The problem is that CDs have 96dB (or 97.5dB for the hardcore signal processing guys) of dynamic range. Effectively, kMixer overwrites the last couple of bits of the signal with garbage, reducing CD data from 16 bit data to effectively 14 bit data.
There are some people who claim that this can't possibly make an audible difference, but most people who have read the psychoacoustic literature or done real-world testing argue that this does make a difference.
You're probably thinking: why does kMixer need to do anything to the signal if it's just taking 44.1kHz data and outputting 44.1kHz data? Well, strictly speaking, it doesn't, but kMixer is not implemented in the most obvious way.
The second issue is hardware (and sometimes poorly-written drivers) that interact with kMixer to cause 44.1kHz data to be resampled to 48kHz.
All AC97 compliant hardware must be able to handle 48kHz sound, so that is always a given, but supporting 44.1kHz sound natively is optional.
It also requires additional physical hardware: either a separate hardware clock or a PLL.
Thus, the physical design of some cards forces kMixer to resample all data to 48kHz. The Xitel Hi-Fi Link is one example of such a device.
More interesting are cards that can support 44.1kHz, but the drivers are poorly written so that they hand off data to be resampled to 48kHz by kMixer anyway.
You'd be surprised just how many cards have drivers that do this. The Sonica 1.2.20 drivers on Windows XP are one example (interestingly, this does not happen on Win2000, or on either OS with the 1.2.05 drivers).
kb. leszűrheted a lényeget ,winamphoz van ilyen plugin ,foobarhoz alap.
#11