Firewire to SPDIF

:)
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$@#

Arj,

That is very strange. I haven't any issues with smoothness. I am running Vista service pak 2 (32 bit) and using the M Audio drivers, and no issues. I do have a pretty beefed up PC. Maybe the power supply is the issue. I used the power supply when I first got it and didn't like it at all. I haven't heard anything about the MAudio drivers, but than I really didn't look for info on it as it's working very well for me. I'll go through the above posts and see if you advised what os you were using, etc. If I see something worth mentioning, I'll let you know. Not sure if you tried the WASAPI but I keep thinking the power supply may be an issue-just not sure at this point.

Arj,

I just did some poking around. The Compaq PCMCIA card may be an isue as well. I'm assuming device manager doesn't show any issues. I'm not familiar with the technology on the interface but I would speculate, perhaps, a better card may help? I'd hate to have you spend more money, but may be worth a shot. I am also thinking, with that great DAC of yours, you may not need the Monarchy? Or...are you using the dip to upsample? Maybe disengaging (upsampling)that as well-or just taking it out to listen? I only use the DIP cause my MF XDAC3 isn't very top of the line these days, while your DAC is pretty much state of the art. I use spdif - out from the DAC; I see you use the 110 ohm out. I'm searching for a PCMCIA card with a 4 pin out as well, whih would eliminate the power supply.