Firewire to SPDIF

Cerrot,
Thanks a lot for the info

I am using a PCMCIA adaptor with 6 pin output. it appears to be thicker and of better quality, but will try the other cable as well
since a PCMCIA bus does not carry power i am using external power.

regarding the settings I actually increased the buffer to 1024, bypassed the mixer (since it is a winxp),

I was using foobar...but will try out J River as well !

will try to change it to your setup and revert back

Thanks again for the tips an the time taken to find the above info..really appreciate it

Arj,

Thank YOU for the tps. I just upped my buffer and bypassed mixer as well and soundstage appears deeper. I will do some A/P listening but, so far, think its a go. Think your issue is the cable and/or power supply. Please report back when you change cables.

:)
BTW instead of using WASAPI you could use the M Audio FW as well to see if that is giving you any improvement.

I think the issue could be with the Firewire bus. I tried this out with my toshiba laptop which has a 4 pin firewire out and the sound became even more granular!. so that would mean that the firewire interface is perhaps a bottleneck.

BTW I tried the cplay player..very very basic but really good. am a bit busy at work the next few days but will try some more tweaking over the weekend.

I don't think it's the bus. Are you ripping with EAC into flac?

Yeah :( this weekend I tried out a couple of options with different Firewire cables,better digital cable etc. stillc annot make iot sound as good as my transport..it is the "smoothness' in music which is missing..something which the Trends UD10 does much better but at the expense of details.
i even re-recorded a FLAC into a CDR and that too sounds better ... are you using any other driver ? from what i read M-Audio drivers are C$@#