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SMSL SU-9 and XMOS DAC driver issues with JRiver Media Center

mikolajek

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Mar 23, 2019
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Warsaw, Poland
I'm using the following hardware config: SMSL SU-9 + DA-9 + SH-9 , along with the SMSL-provided driver ver. 5.70, the speakers are Monitor Audio Bronze 2, the headset is Audioquest NightOwl.
For media management and playing I use JRiver Media Center in its last version (currently 30.0.55) on Windows 11 Pro. I have the audio output set to DAC ASIO exclusive with 8xDSD.

The sound itself is great under the default player and driver settings, but there's one glitch: when I manually change tracks, some portion of the previous song apparently remains in the buffer and instead of starting a new track, I can hear 1-2 seconds of the previous one until the buffer flushes.

I played a lot of with both JRiver and driver settings but found no feasible configuration to eliminate the "track remnants". The best config that secures this is:
- in JRiver - the "use large hardware buffers" option is off and the "minimum hardware buffer" is selected (any change - even setting the buffer to 5 ms - disrupts the sound),
- in XMOS driver - the "safe mode" is disabled and the buffer size is set at 16,384 samples (any lower causes lags).
Any other config causes the above-described issue. But even this "best" config suffers from sound lags when the computer processor is in heavier use.

As advised in the other forum, I tried a similar config but using foobar2000 and no sound issues were present. I just like JRiver and don't really want to drop it....

Is there anything I could do to get the great sound and at the same time NOT need to wait for the buffer to get empty?

I see Thesyscon released the updated version of their driver (5.72) optimized for Windows 11 24H2 use, but SMSL doesn't offer it yet. Not sure if I can use any other manufacturer's driver that used this driver (e.g. WeissEngineering) to check this.
 
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Thank you, @Vincent Kars! On another forum I received the advice the disable all power-efficiency settings, but it wouldn't work (plus Dell says I should not disable Intel SpeedStep).

I'm unable to assess the Thesyscon tool, but I'm attaching its report. Hopefully someone more tech-savvy will interpret it.

I tried WASPI driver but it refuses to play this output (Playback could not be started on the output WASPI using the format 44.1 Khz 2ch" :(
 
Oh,the good old J "DSD killer CPU" River.
8xDSD transcoded output as you want it to be can drain an old PC completely and even strain new ones.

And that without any more processing going on.I ditched it 10 years ago,moved on to foobar and I don't want to see it again.
If one piece of software plays without issues and the other does I don;t see the reason to stick with the faulty one.
 
Is DSD really necessary to have true bit perfect playback?
 
Is DSD really necessary to have true bit perfect playback?
It's not and it is :) Windows alone gives me 384 KHz audio by default.

But I believe I can hear the difference, at least in my headphones. And I certainly don't consider myself an audiophile...
 
Oh,the good old J "DSD killer CPU" River.
8xDSD transcoded output as you want it to be can drain an old PC completely and even strain new ones.

And that without any more processing going on.I ditched it 10 years ago,moved on to foobar and I don't want to see it again.
If one piece of software plays without issues and the other does I don;t see the reason to stick with the faulty one.
I'ts a new one in fact - Dell XPS 14 9440 (2024 model), and as said before any change in the config triggers audio lags, only the default (=highest available) is free from that.

It seems I may need to lear foobar's library handling capabilities (I know it has one, though I don't know it at all), and ditch JRiver after I thing 15 years :oops:
 
Huh, it seems my system is more than capable of producing high-quality music ;)

Clipboard_01-24-2025_01.jpg


Is there anything I could research within this tool?
 
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