DENAFRIPS DAC ---- Owner Impressions, Feedback, General Discussion, Questions and more....

@73max I am very glad you have brought up the intermittent distortion issue, I have been experiencing the same thing for months now. It is a metallic ringing scratching noise that is a constant distortion over the music. It happens at random when switching to a next track or resuming playback. The fix is to pause and restart playback, it's almost like the read/write of the buffer gets corrupted.

Clearly this isn't an isolated incident, have you been able to get in touch with Alvin and/or fix the issue?

@73max, @divertiti - I think I have experienced the same thing. The first couple times this happened, I had assumed it was a bad file being streamed and I just skipped past it. After recently reading this thread, I decided to look at what was playing when it happened today and noticed that Roon had switched to a different album streaming from Qobuz at 192Khz, 24 bit. Restarting the song, it played perfectly. 

I recently decided to try using a direct USB connection between my NUC (running ROCK - essentially the same as the Nucleus+) and my Termi instead of using a streamer. I think I heard this problem before switching to the USB connection, but I'm not completely sure.

I also have a Bryston BDP-2 connected via AES3. I'm trying to decided whether to keep this since I now have my Roon server running on a fanless NUC (with LPS) next to my equipment.

I added Qobuz to the mix only a few weeks ago, so it could have started with this. I have very few high-res downloads, so prior to Qobuz, I was using RIPed CDs and Tidal and had a lot less switching between sample rates.

So I'm not sure if this is just an issue with USB, or a broader issue. I'm also not sure if it is a Roon problem or a Terminator problem. My current configuration is using Roon power-of-2 upsampling and NOS turned off on the DAC.

@jaytor Perhaps we can triangulate the cause, I am streaming through USB from an SOTM Trifacta stack into Roon, upsampling using PCM power of 2. I think we can safely eliminate the streamer since we are all using different ones. It happens when I stream both Tidal and Qobuz, so it's not streaming service specific. The commonality is Terminator, USB, and Roon upsampling right now it seems.

@73max What type of setup are you running when experiencing this issue?

I use HDMI I2S from the Soundaware D300REF (roon bridge) primarily, the said issue has never occurred to me.

Seems like it's an USB sync/handshake problem. I will try the SOtM sms-200ultra / Sonore uRendu on my end and get back.

Cheers,
Alvin
www.vinshineaudio.com

@alvin1118 Thanks Alvin, try using Roon upsampling at PCM (power of 2) and switch tracks or pause and start songs quickly, would be curious as to what you find. Thanks.