Larry Osterman posted in his blog what changes were made to the audio for Vista. Here is the few list of improvements:

  • Entire audio stack has been moved from kernel into the user mode, to reduce the amount of code that runs in the kernel
  • Changes to the infrastructure to support pro-audio apps, to have better audio quality (Larry will update us on this very soon, stay tuned to his blog)
  • Totally revamped UI for audio, Sndvol32 and mmsys.cpl were completely rewritten to include new, higher quality visuals, and to focus on the common tasks that users actually need to do. (we have to wait till BETA2 to see the new UI)

In a side note, I found an issue (not really as this is BETA ) while playing songs with the Real Player on Vista. The player picks the default volumn when the track changes or when the next song is played even when you adjust the volumn in the middle of the song. It seems it picks the volumn level when it loads. But you dont see that in XP or 2003. You can observe the bahaviour from this low quality AVI video file.