One problem that's proved to be nothing to do with noise, it's a  bit embarrassing but quite funny   

I have blamed everything in sight for the past 3 years for weird and frankly cr*p Bass. 'Noise', DAC, amp, OS, mains, they have all come under suspicion as possible causes of the problem. Paul and my friend Pete were most polite when they listened to the bass at my place, I'm still waiting to receive their claims for damaged hearing  .

Armed with the new oscilloscope and a 40hz tone track I decided to trace through the system from DAC to active subs to see if there was anything amiss.

The real culprit ? Each of the active subwoofers on my Avantguard Duo's has a gain knob and a cross over frequency knob to adjust these settings on the sub's internal amplifier. Now the right hand sub has always been the one that would just not work, always too loud or too quiet or just cr*p balance ever since the sub amp modules were upgraded about 4 years ago. With the amp module out of the left sub and poking about in the amp module, I noticed that the knob for the cross over setting was slipping on the potentiometer shaft, but is was just tight enough to not be obvious !! This means that the calibration mark on the knob could in effect be anywhere up to 360 degrees out from the actual setting on the potentiometer in the sub that sets the cross over point. Loads of swearing, followed by big smiles when I sat down to listen with subs properly matched and setup. I cannot say what a difference correct settings have made.

What a hobby, never take anything for granted I guess.

Nick.

Ps after looking at the amp module i'v got a nice list of upgrades worked out so maybe even better bass is to come 

Well spoken Esau. Thanks.
If it only weren't so challenging with in addition that WOW which IMO *is* deep down in there this time.

Oh well, I won't give up anyway I guess. But at least for tonight I have decided to give W7 another listen. This must be after 3-4 weeks of W8 only. Curious what I will find. I hope I won't be too confusingly reporting tomorrow ...

Best regards,
Peter

Nah Alain, that is too much of a simple approach I think;

This now anticipates my last "reasoning" while my first is also still there. So, the first reasoning (attempt) tells that W8 exhibits so few noise that all other gets profound. When this applies, MS worked it out for the better. Right ?
Maybe not for workable result, but this would merely be our fault.

But then I don't think it is to be looked at this like this at all. Look :

On the whole globe, I see that there is ONE guy who really knows what this is all about, and he learned that after me. Not from me, thus by himself, but after me. So, it was me who started this whole subject and the rest is copying it. You can well see the tweaks and players which are there now - and they all sprung from XXHighEnd (users). This includes Audirvana+ on the Mac. But they are copying behavior and don't really know. Well, let's say like the stage I am in right now with W8. But remember, apart from ONE guy. And this guy is ...

The very same guy I had a constant fight with in a multi-thousand post thread and who was head development of the Vista Audio stack at MS. Was, because he left MS after that job. I never talked directly to him ever since, but he is the guy who could really tell, would he have been on the W8 (audio) development team. Heck, maybe I should contact him.

There's also that matter of how at least the WASAPI audio stack has changed, and IIRC it was you who sent me a PM about it (there's only one always sending PMs so it has to be you ). This is about WASAPI now being open to Metro apps with no clue on my side how it would influence Kernel Streaming (which is the base of it all). This is not what your PM was about, although this is in the same direction ("offloading" of audio to other hardware).
At least this would be a very good reason why the sound changed so drastically, because every small thing matters, and this would be a drastic change. Still no idea how it would influence KS, but since this is the base I think it had to be changed along the lines.

Lastly, notice that a PC is not made for high end audio and it has no attention from MS at all. Low latency streaming yes, but that is only one of our "vehicles".

Regards,
Peter

Firstly, I just can't replicate anything approaching what Joachim and Alain are describing. I'm getting perfect stereo panning and a generally very wide sound stage.

As to Peter's Yahoo! moment, I'll go for WASAPI still working with KS - kind of interleaving. Well Peter did say "start shouting the most ridiculous".

Mani.

That's what i thought to hear too at the start.
Now it sounds more, very neutral. I guess because I use Peter's settings now. To early to give 100% thumbs up because I need a lot more listening. But I feel there is a lot of uncertainty/jitter/noise gone and now it's more precise and detailed. It remembers me of the time I was chasing an unbalance between the left end right speaker only to find it was the difference in acoustic surroundings of the left and right speaker. Nothing can be done in my present living room sadly. This was using vinyl. Now with XXHE/Win 8 I get the same acoustic information again.

So for me Win8 is a winner!
( I have to apoligize to the MS-programmers for my bad words because now they did something very good for us)

By now I have heard similar things from others. Well, similar ... the OS messed up. But why not here at my place ??

Alain, didn't you say you just got it running easily ?
Sorry I forgot, but what W8 version do you use ? Mine is Enterprise.

Peter