I judge the performance of my system by the subjective sound-quality it produces and the nature of the playback behavior… My subjective experience is the truth that I rely upon.
I find allocating 4GB playback pre-load memory of my available 16 GB 2133 MHz LPDDR3 System RAM, on my Apple MacBook Pro (15 inch, 2016) with a 2.7 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7 processor and USB 3.0 attached library SSD drive and Thunderbolt 3 PCIe expansion chassis hosting my USB 3.0 controller card (that my DAC is connected to) and a PCI power filtering card… gives me very satisfying and very reliable 5.6MHz DSD128 playback of both native recordings and PCM files up-sampled (modulated) to 5.6MHz DSD128… This is the result of much experimentation with playback pre-load memory allocation… Otherwise, I have found the allocation of more pre-load memory, introduces undesirable playback anomalies…
So we are back to the beginning…
Anecdotally, what we have seen, over and over again here in this Community forum, is system configurations that have playback pre-load memory allocations of 50% or more of the available System RAM, are having a variety of playback anomalies and inconsistent playback behaviors.
System 4g ram.
AO 1.3g
Functions perfectly.
Thank you!
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@RunHomeSlow
My calculation regarding memory allocation size has always been to see what is the largest file I have.
In this case, it is a DSD512 disc where the largest file is approximately 2GB.
If I leave it above double to load two songs, then it would be enough. That’s why I’m using 6GB of memory allocation.
Programs like JRiver, I haven’t used it in a while, you could choose to load just one song into memory or the entire disc.
In this case, you will definitely need a lot more memory allocated.
When I used Roon, there was no option to load it into memory in advance, it always read directly from the HD or SSD.
In the opinion of the Roon developers, this had a drop in quality. I don’t know if that’s still the case.
But thanks for sharing your tweak, I’ll do some testing here. 
I think everyone can test. I don’t notice any difference in sq or performance If I set buffer 1 GB or 4 (I have 8). Of course If I set 1 cpu usage will be higher and not the entire song îs buffered but I don’t care since the performance/sq îs the same for me. In fact îs better - some radios have slutterings with bigger buffer, don’t know why. But I don’t have golden ears / High end system / acoustic room. Each with his own.