Bill Ruckman was kind enough to forward the following (from Techworld):

– Vista covertly degrades playback quality. PC voice communications rely on automatic echo cancellation (AEC) in order to provide acceptable voice quality. This requires feeding back a sample of the audio mix into the echo cancellation subsystem, which isn’t permitted by Vista’s content protection scheme. This lowers PC voice communication quality because echo affects will still be present.

- This overt and covert degrading of quality is dynamic, not consistent. Whenever any audio derived from premium content is played on a Vista PC, the disabling of output devices and downgrading of signal quality takes place. If the premium content then fades away the outputs are re-enabled and signal quality climbs back up. Such system behaviour today indicates a driver error. With Vista it will be normal behaviour.

- Vista has another playback quality reduction measure. It requires that ‘any interface that provides high-quality output degrade the signal quality that passes through it if premium content is present. This is done through a “constrictor” that downgrades the signal to a much lower-quality one, then up-scales it again back to the original spec, but with a significant loss in quality.’ If this happens with a medical imaging application then artifacts introduced by the constrictor can ’cause mis-diagnoses and in extreme cases even become life-threatening.

So, to summarize, Microsoft has decided to implement several heavy handed DRM measures which will serve to further alienate many “power users” that know better. Suse Linux anyone?

Read the full article over at Techworld.