ASIO2WASAPI FREE by falcosoft

[ALC]

8 hours ago, Jeslan said:

When you want to update the drivers of one of the devices from your motherboard to their latest version you have to go directly to the chipset manufacturer (in this specific case Realtek) and download the driver from their own website.

This is true for Realtek except for their audio drivers which you have to get from the  motherboard maker.

[Jeslan]

10 hours ago, ALC said:

This is true for Realtek except for their audio drivers which you have to get from the  motherboard maker.

I see, thanks for the information. Certainly this was not the case until 5 years ago. Although to be honest, after checking it imho what most probably seems to be happening here is that Realtek simply just stopped releasing new drivers for their audio chipsets and simply started to rely on Windows 10 and 11 to deal with their driver installation. In fact when I went to check my motherboard support page (bought 6 months ago) there was no single driver download files apart from the intel chipset one, no audio drivers installer, not either for any other device. My guess is that any Realtek audio driver installation files that can still be found on motherboard websites must probably be just old Realtek installation files from 5 years ago.

Edit: Ok, my bad. I checked it again as it felt weird to be honest and now it seems the website is showing all drivers. Indeed it appears the Realtek audio drivers are there and are apparently updated to this year.

Edit2: Seeing the driver file name though (Realtek HD Universal Driver) it doesn't seem at all that the driver actually comes from or has anything to do with the mainboard manufacturer but actually Realtek themselves. It totally seems that Realtek just wanted to save costs by letting the delivery to the mainboard manufacturers. In fact the console app that usually came with the drivers is now an app hosted and downloaded from the microsoft store. I still remember Realtek servers were always extremely slow when you tried to download the drivers from their website and sometimes having to rely on third party websites like Guru3D because of this.

Edited December 31, 2023 by Jeslan

[Kayru]

I prefer to use a 150€ DAC that sounds miles better than any low cost audio interface whose sound terrible. M-Audio, Focusrite Scarlett, MOTU, etc, have a miserable sound quality compared to my Kuang Pai Plus4 DAC. Plus4 sounds aImost as good as Antelope Audio Zen GO. I don't need to record any external instrument or mic. I produce electronic music (EDM), for vocals I hire a singer at distance. I have a degree in Electronic Music Production and I'm not using an audio interface at the moment, since I don't need one, unless I couldn't work with a universal driver, which is not the case, at least for now. Steven Slate VSX headphones have eliminated the need of Studio Monitors. They mix as well as some ADAM A7X on a properly accoustically treated room. So again, I'm not buying an audio interface.

So my experience with ASIO2WASAPI was phenomenal. The project is complex, plenty of VST. I can work at buffer 144 with 7ms latency without a single issue. It's by far the best universal driver I've used so far for my system (Ryzen  7 1700X/32GB/2X SSD). Latency is amazing, in my case just possible (and stable) with ASIO2WASAPI.

Edited June 6 by Kayru