Dobrescu George
Reviewer: AudiophileHeaven
Hi Vartan
For sample rates higher than 192kHz it is recommended to use at least the Reliable streaming mode setting.
Low latency may reduce the number of Buffers allocated for ASIO sufficiently that any father sample rates than 96kHz will have dropouts, of course this is ultimately hardware dependent.
Equally the software buffers should be set to at least 8192 with Streaming at reliable, for sample rates above 192kHz, the Auto setting of the V3.2 Driver will also be ok.
Further, for J-River, especially if playing higher sample rates, the minimum settings that should be applied are the recommended 50mS buffer with "Use Large Hardware Buffers" enabled.
Lower buffer settings may work, depending on the hardware, but if they don't, well, don't use them. Contrary, some hardware may need larger buffer settings than even those recommended.
Contrary to urban audio myth, reducing buffers and/or latency does not improve sound quality, it merely increases the risk of dropouts, often on the contrary larger buffer sizes tend to provide better sound quality.
Excessive buffer length however may cause lip-sync issues, though many modern TV's have so much build in delay on the picture due to processing, that audio often needs extra delay to be in sync.
I hope that this answers your queries.
Best wishes
iFi audio Team
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I wanted to add this, from my multiple experiments, it seems that having the buffers set pretty high provides the absolute best audio quality and experience, except for the case where you do need lip sync, but after over 30 tests, I never went out of lip sync , even with the largest buffers on my laptop, using madVR + MPC-HC.
No idea if a TV would go out of sync though.
Cannot compose or master music or do anything that needs quick things if the buffers are high though, but that won't be the case for most people, I think that most consumers are safe with large(r) buffers and reliable settings, it is for their own good.