asio4all vs device asio

[mihai]

i moved back to windows after almost a decade of being spoiled by core audio in os x and i was hoping for some of your experiences with asio4all vs. the asio that comes with sound cards.
personally i seem to get the same performance with either driver in terms of the daw but asio4all doesn't let me also route system audio through my interface.

what have your experiences been?

[login]

Good dedicated Asio drivers should perform better than ASIO4all, if not the interface is bad and not worth the money.

The ones I have personally used that are better: Steinberg UR line and RME. Focusrite, M-audio, Akai and Presonus had the same or worst performance than ASIO4all.

[contortrix]

ASIO4ALL is a hack that wraps around the slow DirectX drivers and presents a "fake" ASIO interface to your DAW. This used to be useful in days long past, when some DAWs would only work with ASIO, and using DirectX wasn't an option. Nowadays ASIO4ALL is harmful in most cases I encounter in the wild. I'll be helping someone fix their broken Traktor or Live or whatever, and I'll discover that they've installed ASIO4ALL on top of the official ASIO drivers for their sound card, and of course they'll have the ASIO4ALL wrapper selected, and wonder why there's an awful lag.

You'll want to use the official ASIO driver for your sound card. If there isn't an official low-latency ASIO driver for your card, you'll want to get a proper card that has an official low-latency ASIO driver.

There are some edge cases in which ASIO4ALL delivers better performance than official drivers. I've never actually seen this happen in real life, but I've heard it can work on some hardware.

Live can use DirectX and WaveRT directly, so you don't need ASIO4ALL to use your built-in Realtek or any other non-ASIO sound card with Live.

[Tarekith]

What he said. Even back in the say asio4all was a workaround, a last resort when the default driver was causing issues or you REALLY needed to use mulitple soundcards. It's a shame so many people are still recommending this when the default drivers these days are usually a lot better.

[fishmonkey]

ASIO4SOME