Hi guys. First post on this forum. I'm posting here because I can see a review of the X-SABRE 3 which I also got 1 week ago. Sound is great and definitely better than my MA mini-i Pro 3 which I have next to the X-SABRE 3. Now the bad: as of today I have found 8 bugs so far. All of them have been confirmed by Matrix Audio and they are working in a new firmware to fix all of them. What worries me is that the owner posting in here says his X-SABRE 3 is performing well while mine not. Maybe am I too picky? I thought I got a faulty unit but according to Matrix Audio all the issues I have are firmware related and not hardware related. In any case, here is the bugs list so other owners could check if these bugs are present in theirs X-SABRE 3.
1. Auto Sleep function from Roon works most of the time but not always.
2. TIDAL Connect have a gap between songs of 4 secs when skipping tracks. It takes 4 secs for any song to start playing. Meaning there is no gapless playback. TIDAL is also looking at this bug as I reported it with TIDAL 2 days ago.
3. When playing Tidal Connect, once pause then play again there will be a short fade in occur.
4. Playing MQA, when pausing a MQA song, then replay, the song starts for about 1 sec, then stops then starts again with a fade in. All MQA songs start with a fade in, no matter if there is no change in sampling rate.
5. If X-SABRE 3 is on Standby and start playing a song from Roon, will get “Failed to open the Audio Device” error message on Roon. Pressing play twice makes the error message go away.
6. When playing with Roon DSD files at 2.8 or 11.2, no matter the sampling rate, if pause the song, as soon I press play again, there is a loud POP coming out of the speakers.
7.- PCM (FLAC) songs get cut by about 100ms to 250ms at the beginning of the song. This only happens with some songs, not all of them and mostly with songs from Qobuz.
None of the bugs reported happens with the Matrix Audio mini-i Pro 3 which I also own and it’s next to the X-SABRE 3 so it’s easy for me to discover new bugs.
Matrix Audio was able to replicate all the bugs reported above and they are already working to fix them. I also provided Matrix Audio with videos showing these bugs and songs playlist so they can easily replicate all the bugs discovered.
A new bug that happened yesterday while listening to some music:
The X-SABRE 3 screen got frozen. The X-SABRE 3 was playing but the screen remained with the same album cover for more than 10 songs. Skipping tracks had no change on the screen but the new track was playing. Tried to put it on standby with Roon, with the remote and with the standby X-SABRE 3 front panel power/standby button but after 1 sec on standby came back ON with the same album cover. Changing inputs did not solve the issue. I had to take the power cord out and after fully reboot the X-SABRE 3 screen cleared up. I know this could happen as it’s literally a computer and computers froze from time to time but it’s worthy to check if this is due to a firmware bug or just normal computer stuff.