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[BCZ]

I was very excited to see that JRiver has updated the WDM driver in JRiver 24 as I had a number of issues with the WDM driver.

I'm glad to see that a few problems, such as the initial stuttering and response time has been greatly reduced. However, there is a subtle sound quality bug that has not been fixed.

I've noticed this bug for a few months now, but I didn't want to report it without some digging to help out the devs. Unfortunately it doesn't seem like I will have time to do that for the next little while, so I'll just report the bug.

There is a VERY subtle sound quality bug when using WDM. I noticed that there is a slight loss in fine detail when routing music through WDM vs playing through JRiver itself. The difference is very subtle, and I'm not sure this can be heard on <$1000 speakers. Headphones are probably better. When there is a lot of detail in music, it forms a "texture" to the sound, just like the texture of a material. On JRiver, you can hear the texture of the vocals. On WDM (using Foobar2000), the texture is mostly lost, as if you're touching a somewhat smooth material. I didn't want to describe the sound as "smooth" since that usually has a different meaning, and in this case I'm describing a loss in fine detail.

I am baffled because it is not a frequency response issue, because I did loopbacks on the WDM driver and the output was essentially flat. The phase and excess phase all looked fine. This matches my listening experience as there were no difference in tonality, only detail.

However, I know this exists, because I doubted myself due to the measurements, so I've actually asked someone to run a blind test on me and I got a perfect score in distinguishing WDM vs JRiver.

This is why I originally wanted to do more digging, as I am very curious to the problem myself. I suspect it is a slight error in the arithmetic calculation that is causing this loss in fine detail.

My setup: Windows 10 on a MacBook Pro 13". I've tested both Foobar2000 and Windows Media Player to make sure it isn't a Foobar2000 issue. I am using JRiver as an active DSP for an extremely high quality speaker.

Let me know if I can help in any way.