Ethernet streaming and occasional white noise on Windows

[AlexS]

Day off work today and much extensive listening. I was using JRiver WASAPI with everything set to 16/44 to avoid white noise. But White noise came regularly after a couple of hours, and often repeated even after a full reboot. Gave up and switched to iTunes, which is supposed to be bit perfect if you set everything to 16/44. I don't think it sounds quite as good as JRiver WASAPI, but ran without white noise for 4 hours. Interestingly, I kept the WASAPI bit perfect setting in the AIR GUI when running iTunes, so it looks like the issue is caused when the actual music player is feeding WASAPI. Very odd, as I still got maybe two hours before any issues with JRiver WASAPI.

Is this a consistent pattern for you: about one (or so) hour of music before the noise with the HD format, and over 2 hours with 16/44? Smells like a gradual overflow/corruption of some memory buffer, proportional to the amount of data fed to it. Please keep on sharing your observations with Devialet. One day they may have a revelation.
Meanwhile, I've been using JRiver (MC20) in place of Foobar for about a week now. No white noise thus far, but no prolonged listening sessions either. I did notice an interesting thing, though. One day I got 0.5 - 1s dropout in music, which I eventually was able to trace to Windows Defender (anti-virus), which automatically installed an update and ran an auto-scan, 20 minutes into the listening session (when it thought the CPU was idle). The entry in the history this created coincided with the dropout. As a result, I both disabled auto scans in Windows Defender, and also excluded one JRiver folder from the scan (per their recommendations on the Wiki). I don't know if anything like that can be related to the white noise, but I do recall now that I was getting the problem more frequently in those listening sessions when I turned on the computer for the 1st time during the day (and this is when all the updates/auto-scans kicked in, since they were all configured to run nightly, but the computer was always turned off at that time). This does not look like a mere coincidence. I've also disabled automatic windows updates.
All in all, if you have Windows Defender or another anti-virus, could be a good idea to disable it for a while, to rule out (or, maybe, in) this possibility.
BTW, I like JRiver, and will be switching to it from Foobar. Has nothing to do with SQ, but the interface, and JRemote, which beats its Foobar counterparts.