I learned that S/PDIF should not be used if one has a FireWire mixer, so I'm not using the S/PDIF connectors, even though the ASUS P5W DH Deluxe motherboard and the Tascam FW-1082 mixer both have S/PDIF connectors.

Realtek Sound Manager

Whenever a device is plugged into a sound jack, the Realtek Sound Manager magically appears. Sometimes it is useful to run this program upon demand, but the installation utility does not put a shortcut to this program in the Windows Start menu along with the other ASUS programs.  It took a while for me to discover that this program is actually a Windows Control Panel applet, and can also be invoked by running C:\WINDOWS\system32\RTSndMgr.Cpl.

The Sound Effect panel is rather straightforward, and merely consists of a selection of reverb and equalizer settings.

The Mixer panel is closely associated with the Audio I/O panel and the Windows Volume Control. It took some time to discover that the the jacks on the computer back panel are the Realtek HD Audio output and the mini phono stereo jacks on the front panel of the computer are referred to as the Realtek HD Audio 2nd output. Each time you connect a new audio source,

Here is the hidden Realtek HD Audio 2nd output volume information that is not displayed when Realtek HD Audio output is displayed:

Similarly, all connected inputs appear on a pull-down menu, and you can adjust the input volumes independently. It's really awkward to adjust the volumes for all connected I/O devices - why not provide all possible audio source volumes together, and disable the ones that are not connected?

The situation gets really complex when using an external mixer like the Tascam FW-1982 I purchased. These images show the setup I figured out after a long struggle. With this setup, the sound sources can be heard through the front headphone jack, and the front microphone is routed to Windows applications. Since the headphone output of the mixer is fed into the grey input connector on the computer's rear panel, the mixer output can also be heard through the computer headphones when plugged into the front panel. Here are the other settings for the Mixer panel above:

Bass setup seems relatively simple. I haven't set that up yet.

The Audio I/O panel is very important. The icons change to suggest the types of devices that you have indicated to the Realtek software you have connected. This only works if you connect devices while Windows is running.

The devices plugged into the computer's back panel were:

• black -speaker
  
• blue (Realtek primary input) - Tascam stereo headphone output
  
• green (Realtek line in) - another external sound source
  

If you have more than one input device attached to the computer you will see a pull-down menu that allows you to Select an Activated Device. In the image below notice that I've enabled noise suppression for the microphone attached to the front panel input.

Windows settings

The Windows audio properties and the Windows volume control is an important part of the setup. First, three important tabs of the Windows Audio Properties dialog box:

The Windows volume control gets pretty complex once several devices are attached:

Selecting Options/Properties brings up this dialog. Note that Realtek HD Audio 2nd output is the selected mixer device, and that the Tascam FW-1082 hardware mixer shows up in the selections.

Here are the settings for the Realtek HD Audio output devices that were connected:

Here are the settings for the FW 1082 Analog 1:2 devices that were connected:

 

 

ASIO Driver

The ASIO (audio) drivers supplied with the motherboard have a lot of latency.  I noticed a huge lag when playing back overdubbed audio over MIDI using Cubase SX.  I downloaded the free ASIO drivers from asio4all.com. After configuring the ASIO4ALL driver and telling Cubase to use it, latency was no longer noticable. Here is the configuration panel for ASIO4ALL showing the setup I used:

Unfortunately, ASIO4ALL doesn't handle multiple inputs and outputs such as found on the ASUS P5W DH Deluxe and I was not able to use it effectively.  The problem went away when I purchased the Tascam FW-1082 FireWire mixer and I was able to use the ASIO driver that came with it.