Cool, thanks Lizard King. How did you optimize the OS for audio? Any tweaks you care to share?
Did you disable the Win10 'spying' functions?
If you use a laptop, do NOT use one with a touch screen as they emit a lot of RF noise.
Replace the SAT HDD with A SSD drive. Install the windows 10 OS and the player of your choice, IE J. River Media Center. Run the Audio for your Dac in WASAPI mode.
Disable system Restore and also disable the swap file. Disable indexing, write caching and prefecth/superfecth.
Download and install Fidelizer and run it in extremist mode.
Always keep your music files on an external HDD. If you have a mac laptop, use teh thunderbolt inferace. If you are on windows, connect the HDD with a good USB 3.0 cable and connect the Dac to a USB 2.0 cable. Cables do make a big difference.
Upgrade your RAM to 8.0 GB.
If all this has been done, in J River, make sure you load songs into memory and give it exclusive access.
Let me know how it goes.
Liz