WOW this is a big statement. I know how good that esoteric combo sounds

I had in the past a rotel 971, it was easily beated with a teac 10se. The 991 was probably on par, not not with a quality external dac. I have googled the rhcd-10 and seems the top of the line. Good sturdy unit.

???
I dont understand. You must have done a typo with some attended/unattended in the list above.

Wait, wait, wait.

I remarked that Q1=4 is indeed the gold standard because that's the setting that i like the most, not the one most different from foobar. That would be just silly.

I experimented with several settings. Anything under 0 was plain cr*p (=digital)
Tried 5, 6, 8, 10, 14 and the max. Above 14 things went too fussy. Between 4 and 6,8,10 I ended to prefer 4. Between 4 and 14, it is more a matter of taste. with some recording 14 (more smoothing) can be more pleasant, but I believe to be less true to the original.

Now, my comparisons with Foobar, which started about one year ago are interesting too.
I told Peter that I felt xxhe to be a BIG improvement over it only from version v (or w now i dont remember).
So they come after, choosing the Q1 and the Q1 has not been changed after that. I used 4 since the first time Peter said that it was his favourite. I tested again with x1 and my preference was still Q1=4. In that occasion i briefly tested Q2 and Q3, but didnt like them particularly.

I have to say that I didnt do much tests with those, and after the comments on those, I will do more evaluations.

Hi Peter,

It would be very nice to have a foobar-wasapi comparison vs xxhe q1=4 attended (which seem to be the gold standard)

I will try. But i use EAC for wav-flac conversion, which is exactly the same flac version, so I believe that the two files will sound identical.
I try to find time to check this over the weekend.

This is not related to the ripping method. It depends on cpu usage and the realtime decompression that flac requires.
On my E8400 with xxhe I do not hear differences between flac and wav (both 16.44k1).

Few. 4, then 7-8.

Probably related to this,

x7 doesnt like to play the last song in the playlist, when i select it and then hit play - it plays the FIRST instead!
Happened most of the times with another computer yesterday.

AFAIK 6c didnt do this.

I always kept the splitting at the default 100 and Indeed didnt get the OOM error.

But i (very) seldom get the no track given :/

Yes, of course. I'll try to get the same model.
BTW, I think this LG has some special cache algorithm, 2mb cache IIRC. The caching can be influencing the rip?

I wont read that thread, i have too many subscriptions already at dyiaudio and there are way too many skepticals around there.

Using 6c.
No stops here, except for very rare "no track" error popup.

Looks like that I cannot delay buying a BD-rom player

Pity I have a BD in the livingroom and 0 disks lol, long story with the tv.

False. the i2s cable must be short. Peter says 1m, i think thats the max, but u can always try

Then build a master clock in the DAC and slave the soundcard to it.
You can't? Yes, you can
After a VERY long search i settled for this card:
http://www.infra-sonic.com/site/p_PCI_quartet.php
http://ixbtlabs.com/articles2/proaudio/infrasonic-quartet.html

Very similar in specs and SQ to the Audiotrack posted above, it costs 90€ in italy. This little gem has wordclock input and output. As far as I know nothing under 500€ mark comes with a wordclock input.

As Peter knows, I'm trying also to get i2s out of it.

Yes.

Because you can put a pci-e x1 card in ANY pci-e slot, being them x1, x4, x8 or x16 (the latter two look the same).
Therefore, you have plenty of choice for your x-fi (but it's not the best choice sonically speaking in its pricerange).

Or, you can put the videocard in the orange one (will run x8 or x4, if you dont play games, you wont notice anything) and have more air around the cpu and the soundcard.