yeah, i think it's partly related to the operating system's firewire driver, strangely enough. at the least, this seems to be *one*of the things - and it's pretty pronounced. it seems to be reversing the compressed sound that i was associating with kmixer sample rate conversion and giving it back it's fullness. but, it's still fading...

i ended up breaking the audio in the machine pretty badly before i got there (i wanted to completely isolate the asio, so i did crazy things like delete the windows audio service, purge the registry of all mentions to all drivers, delete the system audio files, etc), so i'm going to have to reinstall again. like, i can't get it to pick up the directsound out on the m-audio card - which is what i wanted to isolate the asio, but now i need it back. so, i just don't really have a clean system to test with. the fading had stopped before i busted it, so i want to get back to where i was, do the firewire reinstall and see what happens.

it's been the same thing almost every day for weeks now. months, even.

i find some fix. it seems like it worked. i go to sleep. i wake up and it's back to where it was.

i dunno. am i playing tricks on myself? the truth is everything is nulling, so i'm not looking for changes in the actual waveform, i'm looking for changes in playback. is it possible that i'm getting used to the sound every night, only to have to start again the next day? are my headphones or my amp warming up overnight, then cooling down?

this morning's apparent fix was deleting the operating system's firewire drivers and replacing them with drivers from a firewire card i have in the other machine. it sort of makes sense relative to the weird tone issues, insofar as it seems bandwidth related. i'm taking guesses. i've been taking guesses for a while.

and, like so many of these steps, it seems vaguely familiar.

we'll see tomorrow if it's the same thing yet again, or if it's actually a meaningful fix, this time.

is it even the coffee?