Rendered audio - ringing artifacts

For the life of me I cannot get Reaper to render any audio format without hearing a metallic ringing artifact. The audio plays perfectly within Reaper but Wav AIFF extreme high quality, high quality, any bit depth I have tried all combinations ut the ringing continues on every project I render. Even taking off the mastering processing to eliminate that causing it it's still the same. What is the ideal way to render audio in Reaper for no artifacting ?

What are you using to listen to the audio? Can you post an example file?

Komplete Audio 6. Had no problem with it in the past. There is nowhere to post audio here.

Did you try to upload your rendered file into Reaper and listen to it there? Doing this will force you to listen to the rendered with the same setup/hardsoftware as when mixed. I only say this because it happened to me once that playing my rendered song as an Mp3 file with Window Media Player (WMP) sounded different than what I was hearing in Reaper, only because I had turned on the Equalizer enhancement in WMP the last time I had watched a movie (I need more bass at the time) and forgot to put it back to neutral. I suspect that some other playback devices may add their own color too...

Use a media player, that uses Asio . A good freeware is Oceanaudio.

Lots of variables... 1st media player. Have you vetted your media player? You wouldn't think in 2016 but there's buggy garbage out there that corrupts audio. I still like Songbird. Windows users seem to like Foobar2000. Are you sample rate converting on the render (as suggested by your comments)? Try rendering at full quality first. (You're going to want that render for your final mix anyway when you have it finished.) Then do reductions after the fact. That help?

In what sampling rate is the project? And the output file? What sampling rate is selected in the Windows audio device preferences? What might be happening is that your project runs in X sampling rate, which forces the interface to work in X, too. Now when you switch to listen to the file in a different application, that application outputs in the Y sampling rate configured in the Windows audio device preferences. If X is not equal Y, then Windows performs on-the-fly sampling rate conversion of a really shitty quality and that's what you are hearing. In the extreme situation where, for example, the project is in 96kHz while the Windows driver is set to 44.1kHz, that driver's antialiasing filter may not work well enough and you might be hearing the result (aliasing). But all that is speculation before we know the facts.

Tip of the day: Set your audio system to 96k and leave it. (Talking about playing media here. Not DAW work.) Your HD content (where it might actually matter) will be native. Any SD program will be upsampled to 96k by core audio and for this content you will be none the wiser. HD conversions (eg. 88.2k to 96k) will be just fine too. Depending on your DA unit, upsampling to 96k might even be more desirable depending on how your converters do at SD sample rates.

Komplete audio 6 ..you've said it... I have the same card, playing on WDM drivers always makes the bass frequencies ring. bad sample rate conversion as other said. It's not a reaper problem, try dragging back your mix into Reaper, and check if the ringing still occurs, probably it won't. I haven't found a solution for this myself, if ever you do please let us know ;) Cheers! V

If you are using audacity with the asio driver, it should be able to play it correctly.