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More => Old Versions => JRiver Media Center 23 for Windows => Topic started by: steff on February 22, 2018, 03:35:52 am

Title: Windows 10 and stuttering audio: workaround
Post by: steff on February 22, 2018, 03:35:52 am

Hello,
as previously documented in older post, I am running MC23 on a new HP laptop + Teac USB DAC.
I was experiencing very frequent audio stuttering, especially playing very high resolution FLAC or DSD files.

Thanks to different tool able to check the DPC latency, I identified the problem being the WiFi audio card.
The first workaroud found was to force the card to use 801.11g and avoid 801.11ac: less bandwidth, lower network spikes, no issue with latency.

Playing with the power options of Windows 10 (home) while having always an eye to the DPC latency tool, i identified another workaroud:
my CPU is intel and costantly it changes the speed increasing the DPC latency, no matter how I set the performance of the CPU in the power options of Windows.

Disabling the speedstepping of the CPU almost solved the issue: no more DPC latency spikes even if the WIFi is running in 802.111ac mode.

what I had to change was disabling in the registry:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\intelppm
start set to 4

I am saying "amost solved" because in my opinion this should work without disabling intel CPU stepping.

Title: Re: Windows 10 and stuttering audio: workaround
Post by: Awesome Donkey on February 22, 2018, 03:38:38 am

If I recall correctly, I've seen instances where the Realtek HD audio drivers have caused issues with DPC latency spikes too.

It's a funny and strange occurrence when these things happen.

Title: Re: Windows 10 and stuttering audio: workaround
Post by: steff on February 22, 2018, 04:17:37 am

My laptop has a Realtek audio card embedded, but it has been disabled, even if it was not enough.
Let me explain:
Audio process were consuming CPU for nothing, since I am using an external USB DAC, so I disabled the device from the control panel, so... let me say... the tray icon was displaying a red cross over the speaker icon.
In this way the CPU usage by audio process was MUCH MORE HIGH !!!
I had to disable the audio services as well and so was fine.

One more interesting and very strange thing is that the latency due to the WiFi network card was high just using Teac ASIO driver.
Plugging another M2Tech USB DAC... no and I really can not understand why