Hi Leif
The article at CA is about USB.
I’m pretty familiar with the fact that USB in Isochronous Transfers mode can have an endpoint in synchronous, adaptive or asynchronous mode.
Modern USB DACs like Ayre QB9 are indeed using the asynchronous mode.
This however has nothing to do with the audio driver.
You can have your QB9 or any other async usb dac and it will be async by design.
As an audio driver you can still choose between the ones supported by your media player like DS, WASAPI, Kernel, etc.
What has this article to do with ASIO?
What am I missing?
Bernd Peter:
Correct.
The async mode is part of the USB standard indeed.
All OS major support this standard.
http://www.beyondlogic.org/usbnutshell/usb4.shtml
Basically you need a driver at the DAC side able to manifest itself as an asynchronous endpoint.
This is indeed the kind of driver as developed by Tascam, EMU and more recently Gordon Rankin and others.
Perhaps superfluous but this has nothing to do with the audio driver.
Even bog standard DS runs on it.
The reverse is also true: using WASAPI or any other low latency protocol won’t have any impact on the async mode.