ASUS Xonar Essence STX
Asus STX pops clicks and noise between tracks and formats on Foobar and other media players. Here is an imperfect fix that works perfectly.
What ever player you use for music [i use foobar] you need another one for this fix, but not for playback, rather as a decoy. I use VLC player for video so I just use that.
Here is how it works.
You start playback of any music track in the second media player, [in my case VLC] and pause the playback, it won’t matter where, and it can be any audio format, bit rate bit depth
flac, mp3, wav, ogg etc.,anything. That’s it, you're good to go. Start your usual music player
and enjoy.
NOTES.
My system was making huge bangs and pops when I started playback and when changing tracks, and happened randomly, often between tracks of different formats or bit rates before this fix and nothing else worked. It was horrifying to hear this from a high performance system or through expensive headphones. It even did it when closing an explorer window from which I had selected the track. Thought it was a lost cause until I figured it out, which would be tragic
because it sounds so good and is in my opinion the best value for money audio hardware
device in history.
HOW DOES IT WORK ?
The processing engine begins decoding a track, and when it finishes playing the stream and finds a different format or bit rate, has to drop the process entirely and load the new codec.
[This is an oversight of programing, perhaps to do with juggling resources].Upon loading the new codec, occasionally, the end of one stream does not “mate” smoothly with the new stream and the result is a beautifully faithful reproduction of a mortifying and jagged square wave effect. The problem is the dropping of the output altogether to create silence between tracks. Well intentioned but defeating it’s own purpose spectacularly. By having another player in the back ground with a track playing but paused, ie zero output, but stream intact, you maintain the stream continuity without adding noise to the system. Not a perfect fix and not tried with all combinations of players, but working perfectly on several systems, Intel and AMD.
