Finally I got enough courage (my wireless keyboard and mouse start dropping out frequently after I upgraded to windows 8.1) to reset my PC back to windows 7.... And once for all, every issue got solved, latency monitor shows everything green.

I'm using windows 8 and KS is still better than ASIO at least for latency issue in my case

I'm hoping I can use KS instead of ASIO. My system has i7 8 cores each has 3.3GHz horsepower 16Gb ddr3 ram, 256Gb SSD, (music is on external 1TB USB HDD) but maybe some crappy WLAN card or USB chip or any other reasons I don't know, my WA7 never have a chance to play music without glitches while...

Not yet, not sure lenovo has the update or not, shame on them, it's been more than a year after windows 8 released but still no driver to control the monitor brightness and TV card and I can't upgrade to 8.1 because of some then undriven device.

Just update the chipset driver from intel, haven't got a chance to buy a new WLAN USB dongle... My old Thinkpad T61 didn't have any latency issue when I was back in school... 

Maybe I should just listen to the ODAC while I'm surfing the web and switch to WA7 when I do some book reading... For my W1000x, the difference is not big at all, I'm wondering whether I can tell the difference if I do some blind test. Price has big difference though, maybe WA7's potential needs...

It is Realtek RTL8188CE WLAN 802.11b/g/n PCIE NIC. I updated the driver but the latency is still very high

Thanks, but I'm using an AIO pc so there is no place to add new pcie cards... I tried to change usb ports, it seems to have a little bit difference for the ASIO mode but the KS mode for the ODAC just works fine all the time

The only way I find now is to manually change the process priority of the ASIO and foobar to real time which by default is high, assign it to core7 (any core you want to just process your music) and don't let bad boy like chrome to touch that core. The result is obvious but very inconvenient as...

Although I love chrome, it uses much more resources than IE and firefox, every time I open chrome or a new tab in chrome the latency record jumps, IE and firefox doesn't make the latency increase a lot.   Anybody know some good ways to deal with this?

the monitor suggest me to turn off the WLAN which does help a lot but I can't just stop using network. Also an interesting thing is if I use KS mode for ODAC, even though the latency is the same high from the monitor, there is no issue heard from the headphone, which proves that KS is better...

Thanks, the results show that the longest latency came from Direct X graphic kernel and NDIS 6.3 driver... No idea at all, but both are microsoft junk for sure. What a shame my system has 8 cores and 16gb ram but can't handle realtime audio processing

I just got a WA7 and using the USB connection for now. I'm using foobar in ASIO output mode as the WA7 is using C-Media USB chip and I just can't use KS for it.   The issue comes while I'm using chrome. Occasionally when I open a new tab in chrome, I can hear some glitches, if I keep opening...

My bad, hi fi system in term should include a high quality source... I should say the communication sub system in hi fi system, like we use USB to transfer signal from computer to external DAC. That part has nothing to do with sound quality, its job is just to transfer signal as high fidelity as...

You are right about the coding but if there are no noise introduced by the media, we should at least hear constant and clear low quality sound (means even though the sound quality is low, we should receive the same low quality sound as when it was sent). But in fact we usually hear some glitches...

I think our cell phones also utilize digital signals, but why it has noise heard? This example may be too extreme but no matter copper silver or air, they are just media to carry the signal. Digital or analog only depends on how you process it. Digital communication system has better ability to...