XXHighEnd

All,

At this time I can't emphasize more on how important the "latency" setting of your soundcard is.
I already knew it made a difference, but it was kind of trivial;

The past days I already discovered two times that things sounded "bad" and within a minute I thought of the latency setting I had moved up due to 96K testing, set it back and all was ok again. Mind you, audible within one second really.

Yesterday evening again things sounded in a way that I didn't like it. I wasn't feeling all that well though, so after rebooting the PC in order to get it better again, I just gave up on it. "It must be me" I thought. Well, this morning I found that latency set wrongly, so again the conclusion must be that it really matters. Mind you, more than before (0.9u).

So, try to find if you can adjust that setting, and might it be in ms, know that 1ms is the same as 48 samples of which I know 44.1/16 playback can cope with looking at the processing the program needs and a 2.4GHz Core Duo processor.
I know of others that 32 samples works too (my soundcard won't get lower than 48).

If you use an el cheapo soundcard to pass through SPDIF which doesn't allow to change the latency setting, just try to find another which can. It will make your day.

Oh, don't ask me about (legacy) USB. It might be infinitly small, or depending on the response of the system (hence varying) or may have a fixed "high" setting.

Good luck,
Peter