Limit audio playback quality

This policy setting allows you to limit the audio playback quality for a Remote Desktop Services session. Limiting the quality of audio playback can improve connection performance, particularly over slow links.

If you enable this policy setting, you must select one of the following: High, Medium, or Dynamic. If you select High, the audio will be sent without any compression and with minimum latency. This requires a large amount of bandwidth. If you select Medium, the audio will be sent with some compression and with minimum latency as determined by the codec that is being used. If you select Dynamic, the audio will be sent with a level of compression that is determined by the bandwidth of the remote connection.

The audio playback quality that you specify on the remote computer by using this policy setting is the maximum quality that can be used for a Remote Desktop Services session, regardless of the audio playback quality configured on the client computer. For example, if the audio playback quality configured on the client computer is higher than the audio playback quality configured on the remote computer, the lower level of audio playback quality will be used.

Audio playback quality can be configured on the client computer by using the audioqualitymode setting in a Remote Desktop Protocol (.rdp) file. By default, audio playback quality is set to Dynamic.

If you disable or do not configure this policy setting, audio playback quality will be set to Dynamic.

Supported on: At least Windows 7

Audio Quality


  1. Dynamic
    Registry HiveHKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
    Registry PathSOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows NT\Terminal Services
    Value NameAllowedAudioQualityMode
    Value TypeREG_DWORD
    Value1
  2. Medium
    Registry HiveHKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
    Registry PathSOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows NT\Terminal Services
    Value NameAllowedAudioQualityMode
    Value TypeREG_DWORD
    Value3
  3. High
    Registry HiveHKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
    Registry PathSOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows NT\Terminal Services
    Value NameAllowedAudioQualityMode
    Value TypeREG_DWORD
    Value7


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