USB 2.0 Audio Drivers (Windows 7) / Headroom device drivers? Where to find?

General DAC/Amp/DAP Discussion
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I have a Headroom Ultra Desktop DAC.

When I plug it in to my computer (Windows 7), it automatically installs a generic USB 1.0 audio driver, which shows up in my playback devices as “Speakers USB Audio CODEC” and in device manager as “USB Audio CODEC”. (class 1)

The issue is, the DAC supports 192 Khz audio sampling over USB 2.0, but with the plug-and-play default driver, I can select a maximum audio quality of “16 bit, 48000 Hz (DVD Quality)” under Properties as the default driver is a USB 1.0 driver.

Headroom was bought over by headphone.com which was bought over by headphones.com, and I cannot find actual drivers for Headroom products anywhere!

Does anyone have or would be able to link me an updated USB audio driver that I could use to get USB 2.0 audio (192 kHz) over this device on Windows 7?

Thank you for your help,

Zithras

(note:I couldn’t see any similar topics after searching a bit, and couldn’t figure out if this post should go in the DAC forum or the troubleshooting forum, so please move to the appropriate location if I got it wrong!)

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I know this is sometimes a matter of finances, but you’re using a long discontinued DAC with a long discontinued operating system. Any chance of updating?

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For the operating system, I prefer windows 7 to 8/10 for security, stability and usability. I have other computers that run various flavors of linux and windows 8/10 (or dual boot), and when I get around to replacing the desktop I’ll of course have to choose to either update to Windows 10 or switch permanently to some form of linux, but I really don’t want to switch until I have to.

For the DAC, I bought the Ultra Amp/DAC/Power supply combo new a long time ago, and audio-quality wise, I’ve never had any issues with it. If I were to upgrade anything, I would probably want to buy a few new pairs of headphones, before I would consider upgrading the amp/dac stack. I don’t have anything against updating, but I feel as if it’s still a reasonably good AMP/DLC, any $3000-$5000 upgrade would be minimal at best as far as what I could hear, and I would rather spend the money on headphones given the choice. If it broke, of course, I would replace it with something updated.

As far as my original question goes, apparently the DAC likely only supports USB 1.0 regardless of driver updates, and the generic Windows 2.0 driver is fairly recent and only supports Windows 10. There are third party USB 2.0 audio drivers for Windows 7, but since it is likely the DAC only supports Class 1, 48 kHz is likely the max I’m getting out of the USB input. It does have both Coax and TOSLINK inputs though, so I’ll try those. Until now, I’ve been using the USB input, and have no issues with it, but was examining the driver properties a bit ago, which prompted this whole thing. But, if I can get a higher input sampling with Coax/TOSLINK, I should definitely do that!

I ordered a couple Monoprice Monolith TOSLINK/Coax cables, will see how they sound once they get here. I’m generally in the ‘bits are bits’ camp, but I can understand if i have alot of noise in my setup (whether external or internal), a bad coax may possibly sound worse than a toslink which will sound worse than a good coax, so if I can hear a difference between the two, I’ll consider buying a higher-grade Coax or a glass-core optical.