What we know & what we don't know

What we know and what we don't know about audio drivers. 

Name the number one topic here on the forum! That's right, audio drivers and then the interface that uses them. I bet we almost have equal amount of those threads as threads about using the software. 

We have a general belief and a soft agreement that we should use ASIO drivers. 
In trying to help a few people over time who where having driver issues ( Me included) I started trying to find some solid information about how audio drivers work.. what do those initials stand for? 


I thought I'd share this insightful, way over the top , document on the topic of drivers from the people who are sort of in charge of all this, MS. 

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-ca/library/windows/hardware/gg463452.aspx

It's a 14 page read but it contains some very interesting facts about audio drivers, of interest to us audio folks is how hardware developers can choose different pathways, some harder than others,, very interesting.  it's a little out of date as it only goes as far as Vista. I will not comment further. See if you find some stuff I did. Pr

Recommended; print and put in bathroom for serious study. 

One thing I have known is that ASIO is not the best choice its just the most common known driver. 

I strongly believe that driver developers often find it easier to write a good ASIO driver because it will work on a Windows and an Apple machine. But writing a good Windows driver will in most cases outperform an ASIO driver all things being equal.

Further, because Sonar supports all Windows driver types for audio Its a very good idea to at least try Windows drivers. 

  I think Cakewalk and hardware manufacturers develop with lots of "off-the-shelf" solutions. It's the only way they can afford to give us Sonar at this price, for example.

I've always found that it depends on the interface.I've owned devices where WDM performs far better than ASIO and vice versa. Currently ASIO is my choice. The WDM drivers for my ZED-R16 only expose 8 of the 18 in/outs available.

Absolutely interface related.Many pro interfaces vendors has developed the Asio over the WDM drivers,like Focusrite for example (Wdm are terrible).

One of the more interesting parts of this is how over time they developed different "mini drivers" as they call them.`In this part you will read that as we got to Vista they had better mini drivers that handle the streaming directly etc. 

What I read also is that the universal drivers should work for most audio devices but with limitations on accessing hardware features. 
This would explain FBB situation with the ZED under WDM. 

Paul WASAPI is not an actual audio driver but replaced the KS mixer in Vista and beond.