Playback of DTS & AC3 files appears to chaselock?

[dex Otaku]

This is on a peecee w/WinXP, M-Audio Revo7.1 sound card, Athlon 2500+, 512MB RAM, etc. with VLC 0.7.2.

VLC is thus far the -only- program I have found that can playback DTS tracks anything resembling 'properly'. It does NOT work using SPDIF out, it ends up chattering, packets of audio with packets of silence like there's a sync problem.

Playback of both DTS and AC3 files [audio only, 5.1 channel] seems to have this strange effect, too.. sounds like when one piece of analogue equipment chaselocks another to stay in sync.. a second or two of speeding up or slowing down, then everything returns to normal. I'm sure most people would not even notice this, but it's started to bother me considerably as 5.1 mixes of either format are something I occasionally create myself.

I've tried switching output modules, specifying the dedicated SPDIF parser for either [AC3 works perfectly over SPDIF, DTS doesn't as mentioned above], etc. I also tried forcing VLC to a higher process priority in case it wanted more, but to no avail.

This seems a rather strange occurrence to call a bug, as no resampling should be taking place, etc. I'd say tha perhaps the Coherent Acoustics module is the culprit but this occurs for me with AC3 being decoded by VLC as well.

This is kind of sad to me, because VLC has long since been my main general-purpose media player.

Any ideas, anyone?