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I've recently adopted Sonarworks' Reference 4 VST plug-in to 'flatten out' the response of both my headphones and the loudspeakers in my acoustically treated studio. The improvements in both playback quality and stereo image are significant.

However, it occurred to me that despite the lack of VST plug-in support in Resonic Pro or Player, by switching its output device from ASIO drivers to WASAPI, I could still get low latency bit-perfect playback, but could then modify this output via the Sonarworks' Reference 4 Systemwide utility. This works perfectly, allowing me to get the same playback improvements with Resonic and WASAPI as I do with the VST plug-in inside my DAW, but remaining bit-perfect.

Because of this success, I've since added 'WASAPI output support' to foobar2000 (which I use for album playback), for the same improvements. And all because Tom posted this a couple of years ago explaining the virtues of WASAPI over DirectSound

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Martin

Hey Martin, thanks for sharing this

I'll be giving Sonarworks a go as well in a bit, simply because it integrates as audio drivers, which is really nice.

I believe while ASIO support is a big plus to have in a program like Resonic it is not the measure of quality when it comes to finding and auditioning content. While ASIO is important for certain uses like controlled multichannel playback or bit-perfect/DSD output I think WASAPI is perfectly fine for previewing, especially seeing how most ASIO drivers do not like to operate in ASIO-ASIO multi-client mode (note that ASIO is originally single-client), but have no issues operating in ASIO-WASAPI multi-client mode. It's eventually up to the user.

On a side note to whomever it concerns: ASIO drivers are really just DLL files that talk to the audio hardware. 32-bit applications require 32-bit DLLs, which means that the 32-bit version of Resonic cannot see 64-bit ASIO drivers. Some audio hardware manufacturers started trimming away the 32-bit versions of their ASIO drivers, which is really not necessary.