Fork- I think the issue most people are taking with it is, before the sound they were getting from their system was perceived as being at a certain level of quality. After the change, they are experiencing a decrease in that perceived quality. No hardware change, no driver change, drop in quality on their end. The system might be capable of better performance, but it may also require them to tweak their sound settings which they didn't have to do before.
For example, I would never have described the ingame vox as 'good'. I would have rated it at the lower end to middle of 'adequate' before the change. Now I find I'd rate it a couple of notches lower, but it's not a big deal to me because I didn't think it was that great to begin with. It's still about as good as it was before, most of the time it seems like as long as their mic is not a complete POS, you can understand what they're saying.
I'm not much of an audiophile. I use onboard sound, it does a pretty decent job for what I want out of it. Like I said before, I find it interesting that my directionality seems to be improved from before. I wonder if the difference between my and others' experience is simply that I've always had my speakers set up right and the Miles system deals with it a bit better.
I don't think the sounds are scaling quite right when stuff goes off into the distance though. It seems to fade out down to about 20% volume, then cut out and go silent which is a bit jarring at times. Maybe it's desired behavior.
There's also another school of thought which I happen to subscribe to when it comes to setting up gaming machines. 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it.' I am sure I don't need to tell you the number of times video and sound manufacturers have put out updated drivers that broke things in unexpected areas. I generally don't play that many different games, so as long as the drivers I'm using for the ones I'm most concerned about (AH) are working well for that purpose, I'm not going to mess with it. It's a policy that has served me well for a long time, though I might wind up updating my sound drivers just to see if there's an ingame improvement.
Wiley.