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[audiolover]

When I open the settings menu in JRiver I have different options for the output:

FRONT-HW-IEC958-DMIX etcetera. What is the difference and/or which one to choose?

[Awesome Donkey]

I'd recommend choosing a front: or hw: output (which matches your sound card/DAC) with DEV=0.

[audiolover]

OK, so there is NO difference in quality using either one? Is ALSA the way to go or are there better (more audiophile) solutions?

[Awesome Donkey]

Nope, both front: and hw: are bit-perfect ALSA outputs that bypass (don't go through) any system mixer. If you use the Pulse output, everything is resampled and dithered to 24-bit/48 kHz by the system mixer if I recall correctly.

ALSA is the way to go. If you have both front: and hw: as choices (like I do on Ubuntu), I tend to choose the hw: output for no any specific reason. However on my Arch Linux install I only have front: as an output option so I use that instead. There's no difference in quality and choosing between them is a personal choice. EDIT: I now have the hw: outputs on Arch Linux - thankfully it was easy to do by simply porting alsa.conf and alsa-base.conf from Ubuntu to Arch Linux and the hw: outputs work great along with everything else sound related.

[linefader]

.. on my Arch Linux install ..

can you point me to the location where you downloaded your JRiver Mediacenter that installs successfully on Arch?

[Awesome Donkey]

It's on the AUR. Easiest way to install MC on Arch Linux would be to use a AUR helper for easy installation (I'd recommend Trizen). If you go that route, you will likely need base-devel installed to build Trizen. If you know how to do it manually, you can download the snapshot (or the PKGBUILD) and manually build a MC package for Arch Linux that way. I personally go this route for quick MC updates (I do flag the AUR package out-of-date and blackhole is quick to update the AUR MC package).

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/jriver-media-center

P.S. There is a "flaw" with the jriver-media-center package on AUR - it'll update each year to the next/latest major MC update. If you don't upgrade every year you might have to manually fork and edit a PKGBUILD to keep a specific older version installed.

[linefader]

Trizen did it for me - thanks!

Now I am looking for an option to play PCM as PCM and DSD as DSD. I selected "no upmixing or downmixing" which works fine for PCM. However DSD is always downsampled to PCM 32-352.

When I select DSD as output encoding everything is upsampled to DSD.

I have a DSD-capable DAC (which plays DSD DoP and native DSD) however, I still need to find the correct setting for JRiver. In MPD, I configured it as follows:

audio_output  {
        type                 "alsa"
        name               "Manhattan"
        device              "hw:1,0"
        auto_resample "no"
        auto_format     "no"
        auto_channels  "no"
        mixer_type      "none"
        dop                  "yes"
        replaygain        "off"
        use_mmap       "yes"  }
 
Can you show me the corresponding setup for JRiver?

[Awesome Donkey]

Enable DSD bitstreaming and don't use any Output Format settings.

https://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/DSD

[linefader]

.. with bitstreaming - DSD/yes, it works, thanks! 
I was searching all the time in the audio output options.