I had something similar. I used to play mp3s from my laptop PC. When the laptop crashed recently, I re-installed the OS. To my surprise, the audio came out dull and flat. I noticed that there were two different sets of drivers for the soundmodule. After installing the other drivers, the old great sound was back (to my relief).
Apparently the drivers can have a substantial impact on the way the sound is output on the line-out. Whether that is a result of better software or software that activates better hardware (i.e. a generic set of drivers vs. a h/w specific set) I don't have a clue.
Stefan
On Thu, Feb 21, 2002 at 12:40:55AM -0800, John van Ommen wrote:
If any of you do a lot of listening at your PC, I ran into something today that may be of interest.
I've been listening to MP3s on the command line using madplay.exe, cuz winamp sounded like ass, even with the MAD plugin. It turns out that a upgrade of wimamp had replaced my "wave out" output plugin in Winamp. As far as I can tell, the MAD input pluging was outputting a 24bit stream, and I think the wave out plugin was truncating it down to 16bit.
Nonetheless, I fixed the output plugin, and the difference is h-u-g-e. 24/96 soundcards playing MP3s upsampled to 24/48 really give CDs a run for their money. Especially at high volumes, the extra dynamics of 24bit are clear, and it seems like you can see 'deeper' into the recording as well.
John van Ommen