Audiophile Buffer Settings

[Caleb-Wycliff]

Hi all! Just a quick question about the buffer settings. Does anyone know whether the sound quality increases or decreases with a higher or lower frame? 
I've played around with the settings and found that higher frame sounds a bit better than a low frame setting.
Are my ears fooling me or is the sound quality better with a lower frame size?
Also I find that setting the buffer to frames instead of milliseconds sounds a bit better to my ears.
What buffer settings do you guys use?

Kind Regards
Caleb

[dwrae]

I think it's a psychological thing IF you do not hear crackles. If you don't (and there aren't any), then it should not make any difference. The only thing this battles is possible underflows: when you increase the buffer size, the chances on underflows decrease.

[Caleb-Wycliff]

I think it's a psychological thing IF you do not hear crackles. If you don't (and there aren't any), then it should not make any difference. The only thing this battles is possible underflows: when you increase the buffer size, the chances on underflows decrease.

I guess that maybe true. I definitely hear a sonic difference with my music files when i use 4096 frames more so than any other settings i use.
The difference in sound to my ears is night and day using my earphones, car system and home audio system. In which i use a Dacmagic xs connected to my phone.
The settings also sound very good to me even without the dacmagic xs connected.

All the best
Caleb

[IanNiLewis]

It's not 100% impossible for the buffer size to make an audible difference. We think of digital streams as being these pristine things that map perfectly to their analog equivalents, but that's not really the case. There are multiple reasonable ways to convert a digital stream into analog, each of which colors the sound in a slightly different way. Add in USB and that's a whole new set of issues.

That said, I can't really come up with a particularly compelling theory as to why you'd hear a difference on the Dacmagic, which is a high quality asynchronously clocked codec.