Literal conservatism means clinging to the past

Much as I hate being inconvenienced, and even though I’ve complained about this before, I am enough of a realist to recognize that my current operating system is doomed, and that I will be forced to use Windows 7. Accordingly, I have been conducting experiments with a smaller (80GB) hard drive. Fortunately, it is possible to download and install Windows 7 and use it free for a month, at which point you must activate it. The activation stage is when it actually costs money, and the licenses are not exactly cheap. Moreover, Windows 7 is not “portable” the way xp has always been, so you can’t just pull the drive that contains your OS and plunk it in another similar computer, nor can you “ghost” it over to a larger drive without running into reactivation problems. So I haven’t reached the permanent Windows 7 end stage with this computer. (Itself a complex issue, as I have been through two different drive transplants — finally transforming my old Dimension 5100 into a Dimension E520 running a Quad 4 Q6600, a really nice machine in my beloved old tower.)

I am still tinkering, going back and forth from my trusty old xp hard drive to the 80GB experimental one. To make drive swapping easier, I bought an inexpensive mobile rack, so I don’t need to go inside the machine and switch the cables around every time I want to reboot.

I have compared the two systems side by side and I am forced to admit that Windows 7 is a lot faster and cleaner, and now that I am used to it, I can do almost anything that I could with Windows xp. There is one irritant, though.

Sound.

I have a pair of digital speakers (BA735) that I decided to use because I grew tired of poor sound quality with my machine’s built in sound card and mediocre speakers. The sound is superb, but the problem is that they require a digital sound card which outputs in SPDIF. I had an old Zoltrix Nightingale sound card which in theory should have worked fine, but in practice was a nightmare to configure so that it would work the same way my old speakers worked. I like being able to use the up/down/mute keys on my keyboard and not have to screw around with the volume icon on the system tray. And even after I finally found and downloaded the appropriate legacy drivers and the C-media PCI media mixer (the software and icons look and feel as if they’re relics right out of the 1990s*, which they probably are), and I finally got the speakers working by tinkering with the settings, the next problem was that the output was not controlled by the volume slider, but by the WAVE slider! Worse, there was no way to mute it, and the “mute all” button had no effect on the WAVE even though it placed a check mark in the WAVE’s mute box! (UGH!) I spent long hours trying to determine whether there was some way to link the WAVE slider to the volume slider. Microsoft even has a discussion dealing with this titled —

You cannot control the volume in Media Center when you output digital audio to an external receiver or to speakers on a Windows Vista-based or Windows XP-based Media Center computer

Which told me what I already knew. That it had to be done manually, with the mouse. Unacceptable. I would rather have plain old speakers than go through that ritual of finding and clicking with the damn mouse. But finally, I found a wonderful freeware tool called “Volume Tracker” — which was designed to solve this very problem, and no sooner did I install it when it created a new icon in the system tray that automatically forces the volume to “track” (and control) the WAVE slider. VOILA! I was happy, and the only additional problem was setting it up to open automatically on startup.

Anyway, I got spoiled by the quality of the digital speakers, and I would like them to work the same way in Windows 7 that they do in XP, but no dice! I spent many hours tinkering, and frankly, I think I’ve been lucky to get them working in Windows 7 at all. But to adjust the volume or mute them, I have to open the 1990s console, hit the “advanced” button, and then that opens SPDIF settings box, when then has a separate tab for volume, and so on. There are sliders for left and right and there is no mute so it all has to be done manually. The “Volume Tracker,” wonderful though it is, simply will not work in Windows 7, and there is no way I can make it work. I spent a lot of time reading stuff like this about theoretical ways of controlling SPDIF, but there is nothing I have found — no discussions or software — offering a successful workaround for Windows 7.

So unless I can figure something out, if I am to make the move to Windows 7, it looks like I might have to ditch the digital speakers and be stuck having to use plain old speakers again.

Experienced audiophiles seem to think that SPDIF has become a “legacy” feature. What a shame, because I’m no audiophile, but the difference is remarkable.

I hate to see quality being abandoned, but that often seems to be the nature of what is called “progress.”

I guess this makes me a “conservative” — at least in the literal sense.

But since when is anything literal?

* In the interest of nostalgia, this calls for a picture:

Cute, no?