i have a laptop with "soundmax" integrated audio and was wondering where i could find the specs, mostly so i know how to best set up foobar2000 (if i need to resample). im running win xp. from control panel, i can get to "soundmax control panel" but that dosent seem to tell me anything. any other advice?

Try your motherboard/PC manufacturer's website?

Soundmax is an "engine" for a wide range of codecs. Your manufacturer is usually a dead end. Your best bet is to open your laptop, and locate your sound chip. Too squimish? Try to find the model number of the mainboard that corresponds with the model number of your laptop, then search for the schematics of your mainboard.

You'd probably wanna try EVEREST first, see if you could salvage any info before opening your laptop up.
Try looking under 'Summary' for details on the chipset or 'DirectX Sound' for details on the driver.

Btw, EVEREST is what was once known as AIDA32...

My guess is that it resamples everything to 48khz. According to the site it supports 48khz. I don't think you can change the output frequency manually anywhere, so that's why i guess it just supports 48khz output. If it would support 44.1khz, you should be able to choose it somewhere.

Try the udial sample (if somebody knows where to download it?) with and without resampling.
- If you don't hear a siren without resampling then your onboard doesn't resample or the resampling is high quality.
- If you hear a siren then your onboard resamples to 48khz in a crappy way so you should use foobar with resampling.
Using Kernel streaming as output in foobar will probably improve the soundquality too.

EDIT: my typing is not good in the morning and some more editting

i like the looks of this everest program alot, but i haven't gotten any useful info out of it yet. do any of you know how i could find the hardware audio capabilities of my computer w/ it?

ok, i found the sample, and my results seem alittle different than most peoples'. first of all, i took your advice and switched to kernel streaming, and my music played fine. then i found the udail sample, and it wouldn't play w/ kernel streaming. so i switched back to waveout, and it played, but when the volume is up, i hear the "siren" with the resampler off, and any time the resampler is set to 44.1khz or higher. when the resampler is on and set to 32khz or lower, i hear no siren, just the dialing. what does that mean?

It's very strange that normal music works but the udail sample doesn't work with kernel streaming...So i guess you have to use waveout for testing with this sample.
I believe the siren is caused by clipping of the peaks that are created while resampling. When you resample to 32khz the peaks will probably be removed or lowered, so then you won't hear the siren anymore.

Set resampling to 48khz and then turn down the volume of your soundcard untill you don't hear the siren anymore. After that set your output to kernel streaming and you can listen to your music at the highest possible quality your onboard can handle (still very low quality probably, because of the low quality DAC).
I hope you can hear any difference in quality anyway

Well, those are the only places u could guess out your audio chipset's capabilities.
(though I suspect EVEREST gets the info from your audio driver...)