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The muffled audio on Boot Camp

bwintx

bwintx

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jul 17, 2002
371
326
This week is my first time to try Boot Camp (2017 iMac). First thing I noticed once I had everything reasonably settled down was the, as I learned, widely reported muffled — or, one might say, "treble-challenged" — quality of the audio in Windows on Boot Camp with the standard Cirrus drivers. Am wondering whether there are any hard and fast answers to this, yet. It appears from my Googling to be a long-term problem that has never truly been resolved. I tried changing some suggested settings in the Properties for the Cirrus audio driver, but the difference was negligible. Thoughts? Links to drivers that fix this?

EDIT: Through headphones, audio is normal; the sub-par performance is only on the Mac's built-in speakers. (Haven’t tried with external speakers, but it would be through that same jack so I’d expect that setup to be fine, too.)
 
Last edited:
bwintx said:
This week is my first time to try Boot Camp (2017 iMac). First thing I noticed once I had everything reasonably settled down was the, as I learned, widely reported muffled — or, one might say, "treble-challenged" — quality of the audio in Windows on Boot Camp with the standard Cirrus drivers. Am wondering whether there are any hard and fast answers to this, yet. It appears from my Googling to be a long-term problem that has never truly been resolved. I tried changing some suggested settings in the Properties for the Cirrus audio driver, but the difference was negligible. Thoughts? Links to drivers that fix this?

EDIT later that night: Through headphones, audio is normal; the sub-par performance is only on the Mac's built-in speakers. (Haven’t tried with external speakers, but it would be through that same jack so I’d expect that setup to be fine, too.)
Click to expand...

EDIT the next afternoon: And, lo and behold, after extended use of the headphones both last night and this morning, I booted back into Windows in BC this afternoon and found the speakers' audio to be perfectly normal, just as if on macOS. So apparently that fixed it, perhaps through some P&P-style futzing with the drivers that I didn't see happening. Anyway, I'll leave this here in case someone has similar questions/experiences.
 
A further update although I seem to be talking to myself here, but am hoping it'll be helpful to others. Was re-re-reinstalling a Boot Camp setup yesterday and encountered the same issue, so I tried the headphone use thing and got no relief there (from the speakers). Then I went into some sound settings in general and noticed it was set for Stereo sound although Quadraphonic was an option. Figured, whatever, and tried Quadraphonic. Bingo! Worked fine after that. Am now suspecting it's a phase-shift problem. Again, this is on a 2017 iMac, so YMMV.
 
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