[shin_lao]

The only way to make "audiophile-grade" comparisons is through blind tests in an appropriate room.

I'd just like to point out that you'll have more variations in your sound by just turning the mini-jack connector than by modifying any driver, who do nothing more than copying a stream of digital audio into the buffer of the sound card to be sent to the DAC.

The only area where I've seen changes caused by drivers is on latency, a latency that matters only in a creative context.

[yardie]

who do nothing more than copying a stream of digital audio into the buffer of the sound card to be sent to the DAC

That's a grosse simplification of what the audio driver does. Mixing, leveling, EQ, spatiality and a lot of other details are handled by driver as well. My last Linux laptop, running Ubuntu, had an annoying hiss when the levels were at 100. The fix was enabling SSE2, which got disabled everytime the kernel was upgrading. From that example I know the driver is doing far more than streaming audio to the DAC.

[neya]

Hmmm, maybe..I suspect it could be something to do with the ASIO drivers, because there is some "spatial-ness" enabled when I use Linux instead of Windows for such stuff. To verify this, I tried playing a FLAC ripped directly from an Audio CD I had @ 1140kbps approx. and I'm not sure how to put it, but I can confirm there was a "spatial-ness" and more instrument-level distinguish-ability while on Linux. Maybe its specific to just this laptop? Who knows...

[nitrogen]

An increased "clarity" or "spaciousness" of sound can be caused by anything from a slight increase in total gain (even as small as 0.5dB) to bypassing or enabling bass and treble controls, even if the controls are set to zero. Some sound chips also have "3D" effects which mix inverted and/or delayed copies of the left and right channels with each other, that can increase or decrease perceived spaciousness. Differences in power management approaches between the operating systems can increase or decrease electrical noise in the system (more noise means finer details are masked), and could also affect the accuracy of the sample rate clock, resulting in different amounts or types of sample jitter between OSes. There are other DAC parameters (i.e. DC bias -- some chips might be able to produce a balanced signal between -Vs and +Vs, but only if they have a negative supply; otherwise they have to fall back to 0V to Vs) that Linux may be programming differently.

The best way to identify any differences is to run the audio into a calibrated measurement device (at the very top end an Audio Precision box) and check the gain, frequency response, jitter, THD+N, etc.

[neya]

Thank you, this is a very clear and crisp answer. Something I definitely wanted to know about! Cheers!

Edit: Will calibrate and let you know mate. Thanks!

[cageface]

These kinds of things can be surprisingly subjective. An audio driver in this case shouldn't be doing much more than shoveling bytes into a device buffer.

[vacri]

An example of expectations shaping opinion in audio: I remember walking into a small upmarket shopping mall and thinking "wow, the sound system in here is amazing - it sounds just like there's an actual piano being played". I turned the corner, and there was a pianist on a baby grand...

[eitland]

Latency can be a problem also when listening to music. HP Power Manager in recent versions (January to June 2012 verified on several EliteBooks) adds so much latency once each 30 seconds that even I can hear it. I even lost entire keypresses.