Are there any onboard sound cards that can play 2 channel and 5.1 channel 24/192 flacs when using the WASAPI plug in? (of the type available from Linn records)

I fancy making a micro or even mini ATX HCPC to replace my full size one, but I need to make space for my X-Meridian sound card until I find an onboard (realtek of some sort I guess?) that can do the above over HDMI ideally.

I’ve a gigabyte Intel G45 at the moment that has a ALC889a chipset, both over HDMI and SPDIF, I only get as far as crackling/hissing with high bitrate 2 channel audio (with WASAPI).

In fact my only success is with the XM using the KS plugin (I’m on Win 7 x86 RC1). With the KS plugin, the only sound card spotted is the XM, so I can’t use Kernal Streaming with the on-board.

I’ve tried various versions of Foobar, up to the latest, the latest WASAPI plugin and all variations of bit-rate output / buffer size, drivers etc to no avail.
It’d be great to hear that the Zotac Geforce 9300 Mini-Itx, with it’s ALC662 chipset could do this, but somehow I’m not hopeful! Or the Aspire Revo with the ALC655.

A few things here:

Kernel Streaming is not useful in windows 7 or Vista as Vista has a re-written mixer. WASPI should be used to bypass the mixer for lower latency and force exclusive mode in most situations. There are only a few corner-cases where Kernel Streaming might work better.

By now, just about any Realtek chips you could buy are capable of bitdepths and samplerates considered perceptually transparent.

That's really all you need to worry about. Please make sure you've read our Terms of Service, specifically rule 8 if you wish to claim otherwise.

That's only partially true: devices which use either the WaveCyclic or the WavePCI model in their implementation are still fully usable with kernel streaming. Only for WaveRT devices, the kernel streaming interface isn't available so you have to use WASAPI as an alternative.

And what about devices that use the WavePCI model?

uhm.. same story as WaveCyclic, as my previous posting indicates.

I'd like to be able play all the test flac files (and so all the purchase-able music) from Linn records, using WASAPI out, as I think I can hear an improvement with this output over DS.

At the moment I can't get a Realtek on board or X-Meridian to play them using WASAPI, so perceptually transparent or not, that's how they were encoded and they won't play.

Perhaps this should be directed at the WASAPI forum, but as I've had varying results from different cards / connectors I thought it might be a hardware limitation....

just got a Zotac Ion A motherboard. It has an onboard realtec but I can't recall which one.
Both on HDMI and SPDIF out, the WASAPI plug in fails when trying to play 82400, 96,000 or 192,000Hz FLAC files (it's fine with 44.1 CD rips).

So to play them I have to use the DS out and let them be re-sampled by Microsoft.

Any ideas what might be causing this?

The driver.

yes, but this happens with 4 different sound cards I've tried now.

X-Meridian
The Nvidia/Realtek one in the Zotac Ion A board
The Realtek one in the G45 Gigabyte GA-EG45M-DS2H iG45, S775
and the onboard Realtek in my Gigabyte GA_P35C_DS3R (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR2 & DDR3 Motherboard

I always get the latest drivers from the MB manufacturer and then try Realtek's own as well
In the case of the X-Meridian I even tried some hacked one's to get it to work under Windows 7 32 and yes I've tried Vista32 and 64.

Is anyone else able to play hi frequency FLAC files with WASABI?

WASAPI, and yes, the interface works just fine even for higher sampling rates - I've successfully tested it with my driver for inexpensive cmedia cards.

great, then I'll persevere and stop referencing Japanese condiments :-)