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More => Old Versions => JRiver Media Center 24 for Windows => Topic started by: Butters on May 09, 2025, 11:19:21 pm
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Greetings,
Today, I introduced a USB hub, between my Windows 10 laptop and my Aesthetix Pandora DAC (same as the Romulus DAC, absent the CD transport tray). Now, the DAC's display reports 44.1 for every song, no matter the song's sampling rate.
The reason that I introduced the USB hub was because I heard my model DAC (the Romulus version) play songs directly from my laptop (as I have been doing), and also play the exact same songs, burned to a CD via Media Center, played via the Romulus's CD tray. The CD sounded much better, for the exact same songs made from the exact same flac files. Apparently, my laptop was sending jitter and / or noise, which was absent when using the DAC's CD tray.
I made inquiries about adding a transport between my Windows 10 laptop, and my Aesthetix DAC. An expert with Aesthetix boxes (and audio in general) suggested that I insert a Sabrent USB hub between my laptop and my DAC. So I did.
The sound quality improvement was impressive. Such an inexpensive, yet seemingly magical upgrade to the sound quality. But now everything plays at 44.1 kHz, according to the display on the DAC.
I power cycled everything. I even removed the USB hub, and went back to the original configuration (laptop connected directly to the DAC, via a USB cable). I also tried setting the DAC to Class 1, and then back to Class 2. Nothing helped.
I searched Windows 10 for all sound related settings. There was one that showed my Aesthetix driver. In the advanced settings, there was a drop-down list to choose a sampling rate. It was set to 44,100. I changed it to 192,000 and clicked "Test". The DAC displayed 192. I thought all was well. But now everything plays at 192 kHz (according to the DAC's display). So I put the Windows setting back to 44,100. And now everything plays at 44.1 kHz.
I am running an old version of Media Center (24.0.72), because until today, it did exactly what I needed it to do (and I doubt that Media Center is the issue). I use Media Center to play my flac files, directly from my laptop to my DAC. That's it. Nothing else. Not even an internet connection. And all was well for years.
I dug through every Windows 10 setting, and every Media Center setting, and found nothing to resolve my problem.
What setting could be causing my Windows 10 laptop to suddenly feed my DAC a fixed sampling rate? The DAC used to acknowledge the sampling rate of each flac file. Now it stays fixed on one sampling rate, for all flac files.
Any ideas?