A Dive off the Deep End: First Head-Fi Setup (and one small problem)

Music was a big part of my life in high school, but somehow fell out of favor in the college and grad school years when I just never seemed to have time to sit back and listen. It didn't help that the only headphones I had in the last decade were Apple's ear buds and all my music was compressed. Over the last year I've been thinking about making a computer-based music server and last week I finally saw it to completion. Just thought to share and I'd also like your feedback on one problem I have encountered.

Headphones are Audez'e LCD-2 (rev. 2).

DAC/Amp is Centrance's DACmini CX.

The computer is a modified 12" Powerbook G4, near and dear to my heart as the machine on which I wrote a book. It has a 240GB solid state drive to eliminate noise and provide ample room for albums. It's the 1.5 GHz model with 1.25G RAM, running the last version of Leopard (10.5). Use the Midi Audio Setup utility to upsample to 88.2/24. I performed a screen hack from a Thinkpad to give me 1400x1050 resolution, which makes it much more usable. I really like the silver/aluminum theme I've got going on with this and the Centrance.

I have one quirk that's developed tonight. When I listen while on battery power, sometimes the music just cuts out. If I unplug the DAC/Amp, the music continues to play through the speakers like it never stopped. It's as if the music just stopped streaming to the DAC. However, this problem seems to go away when I plug in the laptop to the wall. I'm thinking the automatic processor speed reduction when on battery mode might not be able to keep up with the upsampling of ALAC files. Do you guys and gals have any hypotheses? I will continue to test this.

By cuts out, I mean permanently until I disconnect the DAC and reconnect it.
 

Quote:

Originally Posted by Eric_C 

I've got a FireWire interface connected to my MacBook, and the audio cuts out on occasion. Maybe it's just a quirk of OS X?

Does it only happen when you are on battery power, like me? I'm going to try no upsampling, or upsampling with "Highest Processor" setting in the power section of system preferences. I just have a feeling it was running out of cycles very briefly. That's very odd though, because top never showed iTunes taking that much processor power---so I don't think upsampling requires so much horsepower. Heck, when I turn off the lid's light, I get almost 6 hours of battery life playing music.

Odd indeed.

Interesting link that suggests using specific ports. Indeed, I had fewer problems on battery using the front-most port.

http://ts.hercules.com/faqs/eng/her_eng_00363.pdf

Also it does say to use higher processor power while on battery, and to use it on power adapter.