A lot of the things that are in Vista’s audio system are actually a great thing too. Like global and speaker-level effects… speaker & room correction (yea, it does that, very well too), microphone array processing which can directionally focus on voice removing noise etc… there’s literally a laundry list of new stuff that was added that I really think was great.
But yeah, they failed to keep the legacy interfaces working seamlessly withing the new environment & features.
7 brings back that compatibility AND is still has all of those new and awesome features which very few people have bothered to know exists yet. 😉