I use Flacsquisher. Free and easy.

If you have a spare USB hub laying around you might try using that to see if it's your USB ports

Another vote for MusicBee. Been using it for several years.

I thought balanced was more about getting rid of any electrical interference or noise picked up by the cable. Unless you are running hundreds of feet of cable probably not worth it.

My Vali holds its own pretty well with many high ohm headphones,

I hate audiophile snake oil with a passion.   Somehow I hear a difference with this utility.    Ears+brain is a f'ed up thing.

Can someone who owns the HD 380 Pro tell me how these compare?   I'm thinking these will be similar and not worth buying due to redundancy.

  Hmmm. Well, I got paranoid and just went through my whole library deleting the embedded files and linking them instead. 2 hours down the drain.

  Can someone expand on this?

From: http://www.head-fi.org/t/690832/asio-superior/60  

  A quick caveat is that Wasapi running in non-exclusive mode will let you hear system sounds and other audio streams while playing music through your media player. However, not allowing applications to take exclusive control of the audio negates all the benefits of Wasapi and is essentially...

  That was what I read when I tried it out in Vista. Results were very different in 7.

I used ASIO4ALL when I had Vista SP2. I tried Wasapi (in exclusive mode). Although Wasapi was louder, it sounded muffled and less precise than ASIO4ALL. I installed Windows 7 a few weeks ago. I thought I was just imagining that something didn't sound quite right. Played with all my settings...

  Nice. Luckily, the finish on my just-purchased Vali seems to match my year-old Modi.

Got the Vali last weekend to replace a Rolls HA43 Pro. I was disappointed with the initial listen, because I didn't read up enough and know I had to wait for the tubes to get properly warm. Boy, what a difference that made! Very happy with this little amp.