A new audio playback architecture may be used, which allows the use of much larger buffering than that used by a typical audio subsystem in a computing system to improve power efficiency of the system and at the same time allows to maintain the quality (e.g., fidelity and responsiveness) of the audio playback. The audio controller in the new architecture may be made to report back to the host system a more accurate indication of which audio frame is being set to the audio codec than a currently available audio controller does. Additionally, the controller is capable of re-fetching previously buffered (but not yet transmitted) data. Furthermore, the controller may dynamically adjust the size of its local buffer.