I am curious whether anyone can provide insight on the effects of the chosen format in "Default Format" in the Advanced tab of the properties pane of an audio playback device. I understand the meaning of the bit depth and sample rate, but do not know the effect that it has on system resources. Is there any drawback to setting the maximum your sound card is capable of? (e.g. higher CPU usage?) I find this to be an interesting subject but there seems to be very little knowledge on it on the web. Many thanks in advance for any insight that can be provided. Matt Sharpe

Hi, Thanks for posting in Microsoft TechNet forums. The ability varies according to different models. You can run the following software to adjust http://www.passmark.com/products/soundcheck.htm We can determine the maximum sampling rate following the description below: http://www.voxforge.org/home/docs/faq/faq/windows-how-to-determine-your-audio-cards-or-usb-mics-maximum-sampling-rate And this article share with us more knowledge: http://www.tweakheadz.com/16_vs_24_bit_audio.htm Please Note: Since the website is not hosted by Microsoft, the link may change without notice. Microsoft does not guarantee the accuracy of this information. Best Regards Magon Liu TechNet Subscriber Support in forum. If you have any feedback on our support, please contact tngfb@microsoft.comPlease remember to click Mark as Answer on the post that helps you, and to click Unmark as Answer if a marked post does not actually answer your question. This can be beneficial to other community members reading the thread.

Hi, Thanks for posting in Microsoft TechNet forums. As this thread has been quiet for a while, we assume that the issue has been resolved. At this time, we will mark it as ‘Answered’ as the previous steps should be helpful for many similar scenarios. If the issue still persists, please feel free to reply this post directly so we will be notified to follow it up. You can also choose to unmark the answer as you wish. BTW, we’d love to hear your feedback about the solution. By sharing your experience you can help other community members facing similar problems. Thanks for your understanding and efforts. Best Regards Magon Liu TechNet Subscriber Support in forum. If you have any feedback on our support, please contact tngfb@microsoft.com Please remember to click Mark as Answer on the post that helps you, and to click Unmark as Answer if a marked post does not actually answer your question. This can be beneficial to other community members reading the thread.

Well, the information you posted was interesting but didn't really contribute anything towards answering my question, which is what effect changing the settings has besides the actual output resolution.

Hi, Not sure why you ask but generally speaking, the lower sample rate is to to save space and to allow for more DSP processing. The higher sampling rates require twice as much hard drive space, and twice as much CPU processing power. Regards,Please remember to click Mark as Answer on the post that helps you, and to click Unmark as Answer if a marked post does not actually answer your question. This can be beneficial to other community members reading the thread.

Any update?Please remember to click Mark as Answer on the post that helps you, and to click Unmark as Answer if a marked post does not actually answer your question. This can be beneficial to other community members reading the thread.

So what you're saying is the higher settings cause greater CPU load, presumably whenever there is any audio playing? I can see how that would be the case. What would cause hard disk usage though?