A Strange Problem! Baffled... Need some help...

Sounds like the dac is having trouble locking onto the signal sent to it. 2 or 3 possible causes for that come to mind....a poor digital cable link (either the cable itself) or the jack from the transport which is a long shot with the others being poorly ripped tracks and improperly setup hardware. When ripping audio it's best not to multitask I've found (same goes for burning CDR's). Even though I have a Quad core CPU and 4 gigs of Ram and multiple HDD's (high speed) I still can induce gaps in the rip (using EAC) if I'm doing heavy multitasking while ripping or burning files onto CDR's...any glitch or hiccup will cause a gap in the data stream which shows up as silence (while ripping) and sometimes a gap while burning (causing the relay to cycle which is the click you hear) which will not necessarily trigger a buffer under run error..

If you have the original disc for those mp3's you are having trouble with re-rip them and make sure no other activities are present or open on your computer. Then test those tracks...I bet your problem vanishes. Another possibility is your computer software may not be setup properly for the burner/DVD-rom that have installed in the comp. If you use EAC to rip make sure you use the setup wizard and follow all of the steps in the EAC setup FAQ.

Drivers for your mobo/SC and such should be up to date as well.

Good luck

Peete.

If it only does it with certain files then it's worth a shot to try and re-encode them.  First re-rip the CDs if you can.  If you can't, and they're flac just convert it to a wav, and back again, or transcode them to FLAC at a different compression level.  For the mp3s try transcoding them to a better codec at a high bitrate, or just to wav.  If they work after transcoding, then it's probably just the files.  If it doesn't help than it may be something else.