Probably the Media Network (DLNA, server)
If you don't use it you can disable it
Do you mean for the high memory usage? Their DLNA server takes only about 5MB of memory. It's the media player itself that really consumes when it is doing tag, picture or library processing in the background. I've seen it as high as 350MB and as low as 8MB. Doesn't seem to bother anything, I was just pointing this out.
I've finished another round of WAV vs FLAC comparisons and have these comments:
1. The sound of WAV files is always superior on Foobar and Media Center (and other players).
2. Load on the (my) computer does not affect it
3. It doesn't matter what drive it's on, or whether it's buffered in memory
4. It's the same if all source files are on a remote server connected via ethernet. (i.e. there is no difference between a wav played from a NAS to one played on the local system.)
5. On the Korg Audiogate player the differences between the two formats is considerably less. However the overall sound of that player is slightly different from the others. Sometimes it sounds cleaner, other times it sounds like either the HF is rolled off a little, or has some sort of damping applied. It's a very nice listen, but there can be subtleties or details in the source (FLAC or WAV) that are slightly obscured compared to Media Center playing WAV's.
Unfortunately, the Korg Audiogate requires you to manually set the playback bit rate to that of the source. If you don't it will just quietly re-sample it to whatever is currently set. It's pretty good re-sampling, though, and is fairly easy to miss. Also, using ASIO or default device is the only way it will allow you to use all the sample rates of the sound card. If you choose WASAPI and (e.g.) the M2Tech HiFace USB adaptor it will only allow 44.1k even though the HiFace is fully capable of up to 192k.
A THEORY.
I'm pretty sure that the FLAC problem on most players is that they are using the same Real-Time decoder engine, and there are flaws in that engine. I've seen folks comparing bit by bit output of flac.exe to those of WAV files and finding no difference. Of course not. That's not the real-time playback engine.
It
seems as if the processing time for real-time decoding of FLAC inside a player changes from bit to bit and is somehow affecting the resulting timing (though I don't know how) or dropping bits if they can't be delivered in time for the next cycle at the current clock bit rate. If this is the case, the errors and resulting degradation should be much greater at higher bit rates than 44k, but FLACs seem to be quite audible even at 44k. Whatever it is, it's got to be related to the real time decoder plug-in, since we know that the significant bits of a WAV file are completely reconstituted from a FLAC file by flac.exe (which is not a real-time engine).
Any other thoughts?
--Bill