Quote:
The addition of the ReserveCache option (set to the default of 180) completely eliminated both the quick Ws and the long Ws / audio glitches. Thanks!!! Now, why would the absense of this value cause problems...?

Because the default is zero, not 180. As you can see by comparing your bootlogs, the ReserveCache value is subtracted from the player's cache chunk count, which starts out at 180 (or did when that FAQ was written -- it's a lot less now). My guess at what's happening here, is that your extra 32Mb cache -- more than we ever actually tested at Empeg Towers -- is causing a cache run to take so long that it starves out the audio threads. Cacheing runs at a lower priority than audio, but as Mark Lord discovered, once it starts doing big PIO disk reads in kernel-space, higher-priority threads don't get to pre-empt it anyway.

Peter