There seems to be a difference in sound quality between booting into my bootcamp partition of XP vs. booting into OS 10.5.2.
I just bought my first Mac recently, an iMac 24", and after installing XP through bootcamp I noticed that the quality of the sound coming out of the iMac's speakers when running XP vs. OS X is not as good. The sound is noticeably tinnier, like it's being produced by cheap speakers.
It's bizarre. They both are using the same hardware (Realtek, etc.). Could this be some kind of driver issue? What could account for this? I've played with the Realtek eq to no avail. It alters the sound but it doesn't do much to fix the underlying tinniness. This seem to occur with all sound sources: DVDs, music, system event sounds. When I boot into OS X the same sound source will sound much better.
And this question relates to another question I have, which I think I'll re-post separately for the people not drawn to this post thread:
If we can find better drivers can we go ahead and download those (like Windows Update reports that there are better drivers for the Marvell Yukon Ethernet controller available) or do we have to wait for Apple to provide them?
And what motherboard does Apple use, because Realtek says to look at your motherboard maker's website first for drivers before downloading them from Realtek.
The motherboard is a custom Apple board, so you should only use their drivers for it. The sound and graphics drivers can be upgraded when new versions come out though.
my iMac, bought in March 2008, version 7,1, has a very bad audio in bootcamp, where there's Win Xp Pro SP3 installed. Bootcamp version is 3.0.
Yesterday I have download the latest Realtek drivers, R2.35.
Nothing.
The headphones audio is good, the speakers one is bad.
