Hey Guys,

I picked up the Maximus VIII extreme assembly very excitedly as I thought I could finally replace my aging X-Fi Titanium. sadly I have found that any audio output is immediately tarnished with "digital enhancements" that create a literally painful, muffled and artificial sounding environment.

luckily I was able to dispel this audio quality issue on both the supremefx front audio dac and my Nvidia audio output by disabling "Enhancements" in the properties of both devices in the windows sound control panel.

the issue I'm really having is that I had picked up a 7.1 headset that uses analog connectors, and I am unable to disable the "enhancements" for the realtek speaker output, there simply is no tab for it. I hoped the audio issue might of been some setting in the sonic studio software but nothing seems to improve the audio quality.

through attempting to reinstall my audio drivers I noticed that the basic drivers that windows reverts to during the install process lack the weird muffled digital enhancements, so I have actually rolled my driver back to these, but they only support up to 5.1 sound so I am losing 7.1!

does anyone know how to disable these enhancements permanently/properly?