Do I need ASIO for Windows 7 ?

No ASIO required. You can use WASAPI. Several of the popular media players have plugins for it, J.River and Foobar are two of them.

I am on Windows XP with Foobar.
I was wanting to try to move to Windows 7.
Is that 'recommended' ?
I use only computer for playback.
I am very happy with Foobar & XP.
Not very literate with computers & hence an a bit paranoid.
Suggestions would be appreciated.
DAC's used are Ayon Skylla & dCS Scarlatti [3 box] & DAD AX24.
Thanks,
Appreciate the feedback.

bhagwan

Schwinnindia... XP to Win7 is a jump of a lot of years of technology. Depending on its age and the availability of drivers your present computer may or may not be compatible with Win7. Run the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor as a place to start.

For example, I have a dell inspiron 8600 notebook that just won't make the jump... too old.

Hello Pkubica !
Thanks for the reply;
The hardware in not an issue at all.
When I use a dCS Scarlatti, to make a new Server is 'pittens'
So cost is not an issue.
I could use the same Antec housing & Power Supply & change the Mother Board & Processor.
The million $ question is, what 'sounds' better ?
Windows 7 with Wasapi or XP with ASIO ?
I need to know sq & that is all that matters.....
Software in India is 'cheap' and rather easily available.
So having both installed on the [same] machine too is a possibility [boot them separately].

Suggestions & Observations would be much appreciated.

'bhagwan'

Windows XP and ASIO works just fine. If you are just sending PCM out a USB port there's no reason for anything as long as you configure your "player" correctly. Foobar can be configured not to change the bitstream, same for J. River Media player.

I'm assuming your using .WAV files or lossless compressed files, eg. FLAC. There's not much to reading a file, decompressing if necessary, and sending it out a USB port.

Schwinnindia...I'm years removed from running XP anything so I can't help with how an XP system sounds. However, I would feel very RAM limited with XP. The better players load into memory for a better delivery. With Win7 you can easily do an 8GB RAM system and with J River Media Center it's a very solid playback system for 24/96 and 24/192 files.

Thanks Larry & Pkubica.
With a dCS Scarlatti, I can only play 16/44.
The Scarlatti does not accept more than that on USB.
My earlier Weiss Minerva used to accept & play 24/192. But that is gone.
I use foobar & prefer Flac to Wave [metadata].
However, I still have a bit of wave on my server.
'bhagwan'

Have you looked at system latency with WASAPI when comparing J. river 'play from memory' option. Streaming over LAN with WASAPI gives incredibly low latency (I have SSDs on bothe server and client), whereas dumping everything through memory causes a bit of a jump and can even strain the latency when doing 192kHz.

When I moved my T60 laptop from XP to Win 7, I noticed a huge improvement in sound quality. I was using Foobar2000 on both operating systems, but just kernel streaming (ASIO4ALL was too buggy for me) in XP and WASAPI in Windows 7. I confirmed with an external box that XP was re-sampling everything to 48kHz, and Windows 7 with WASAPI keeps the native file sample rates for output. Listening was all through a headroom ultra desktop amp whose DAC was fed S/PDIF from the laptop dock. It has an ASRC but is still sensitive to jitter, which is probably also better with WASAPI, in addition to the lack of re-sampling.