After listening to various thread inputs, and after nearly 300 break in hours with my new Pontus II 12th (I have not heard a single click or pop) - it would appear that it is a minority who are experiencing the click and pop issue. If the Denafrips DAC hardware was "fundamentally" at fault, there would likely be at least a majority of users experiencing the problem. It is more likely that this may be the result of DAC hardware/firmware interactions with particular digital sources and circumstances. And I note that there are reports from users that the problem disappeared after they installed the latest firmware update. In the meantime my new Pontus continues to produce a very fine sound.
Denafrips Pontus II Clicks Or Static?
There have been some who have reported clicks or static occasionally with their Denafrips Pontus II DAC units. And there is a test measurement review of the Pontus II 12th on the golden sound website talking about the following:
"When DACs oversample, they can sometimes encounter a situation where the reconstructed/interpolated waveform goes above 0dBfs (the maximum possible digital value)."
"The Pontus 2 is susceptible to intersample overs, and unfortunately, in a particularly bad way."
"The Pontus 2 does not clip, but instead when a sample value reaches above the maximum, it ‘wraps around’ to the minimum negative value, causing a huge sudden transient which will be very audible and may appear as crackling/popping."
Has anyone with a Pontus II encountered this anomaly when playing CDs? If so, can you elaborate about that? I am aware that the Pontus II can be firmware upgraded, so if this is an occasional issue, it could be eliminated with an upgrade.
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I'm waiting for the file to apply the firmware to my Pontus II. I have owned this DACs for over 3 weeks and have not experienced any pops or clicks while streaming music. I'm in-between owning a CD transport. However, like my Ares II (SOLD), I've experienced a split-second 'drop-out' or minute skip in the music. It's so small, that its over before you realize. Never in more than one place in a single song, and always at the beginning of a track. And lately, it hasn't occurred at all in a week of (75-100 hours) listening. I just hope this glitch goes away for all of Us.
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I have an Ares 2 and a Pontus 2. The only time I’ve had static or popping sounds was with the Ares 2 connected to a Bluesound Node N130 via USB. Using coax was fine. I then swapped out the Node for an iFi Zen Stream via USB and never had a problem after that. Using that same setup with Pontus 2 and never had an issue.
Both DACs sound a little better to my ears after the update. Was definitely worth doing. |
@whipsaw - You can call it a hardware problem if you want, but IMO, it was (is) a rational approach to solving the problem of jitter reduction of source-clocked digital data. I'm sorry you experienced problems with your DAC. With their implementation as I understand it (and I am a digital electronics engineer), there is no "definitive" fix if the source and DAC have significantly different clock frequencies. I suspect this new firmware either increases the amount of RAM allocated to the FIFO, changes the algorithm used to reset the FIFO pointers (e.g. between every song), or both. This won't fix all possible cases, but it will likely reduce the percentage of users that experience the problem from an already small number to near zero. I don't know why Denafrips chose to wait as long as they did to issue a fix. It could be that other more significant changes were required to the firmware to allocate more RAM for the FIFO, or it could be that they just felt it was affecting so few users that they had other priorities. At any rate, hopefully this will fix the problem for the users that FIFO overflow/underflow was affecting. I'm quite happy with the sound from my T+, but I'm looking forward to being able to try out this new update. I've never experienced any skipping/glitching issues, but I have always used my T+ with a USB connection to my streamer (through a Gaia). |
@jaytor If it was not a hardware problem, then how would you explain why other manufacturers of higher-end DACs have not encountered such problems? Jitter reduction is essentially a "settled issue", even in much less expensive DACs. My understanding, though I could be wrong, is that the issue was not reported by users of the Terminator DACs. If that was the case, and it was a software issue, then why would it not have been a simple matter to resolve? Finally, as you have a technical background, does this Cisco explanation of FIFO overruns not apply here? And if not, can you explain why?
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