hi all,
I bought this unit a few months ago and am enjoying it quite a lot.
I have some tech questions, maybe the company rep or others could answer.
1) is there any way to get info about how to enable usb support for dsd playback over linux. yes, this is an extremely technical question and I don't expect anyone to know the answer, but I'd like to help get dsd playback working over linux/usb (mpd, for a start). I do have usb UAC2 working, out of the box, on linux mpd, so I can play 24/192 files just fine over usb/uac2. no 'driver' needed for that since it seems that fiio has implemented UAC2 properly, for pcm streams, at least. fiio: can you confirm or comment on your UAC2 support?
2) when I play a dsd file over the coax-out spdif port, it seems to convert to pcm. I'm seeing 88.2khz coming out of the coax port and its in regular pcm format, not dsd. if it was dsd, it would sound like its mostly noise with some audio coming thru. I'm getting perfect audio, so its definitely pcm and not dsd. my question is: where is this conversion happening? is it in your (fiio) software or is it in some hardware based chipset?
3) remote control, aka, CTIA inline remote; you claim that you support this inline remote standard, and yet 2 remote cords I tried only work in play/pause mode. the skip-forward and back, which are resistance-based in CTIA remotes, don't do anything when plugged into the fiio-xII phones jack and with the menu option enabled. HOWEVER, by random chance, I happened to multiclick on the pause/play button and found that you CAN get skip song forward/backward! double click on the pause and it goes one way, triple click and it goes the other way. single click and it toggles play/pause. that works ok and I can sort of deal with that, but WHY did you do it this way? and, can you properly support the resistance based standard in a later update (or, are you missing the sensing ability to pick out the resistance values?) EDIT: I just tested line-out instead of coax-out along with my android remote and that does not work, either. so, it seems the presence of a cord, of any kind, inserted into the non-phones jack disables the CTIA remote feature if that cable is plugged into the phones/amped out jack. and yes, I even tried connecting the android earbuds remote cable to the line-out jack but that didn't help or work.
3a) related question: when I have the single earbud/remote cable plugged into the phones-out jack, I can do the hack, above. BUT, when I also plug in the coax-out cable (so that both are in their own ports), I now can get spdif-out on the right hand cable but the left hand remote no longer does its remotey thing. can this be addressed/fixed in a future firmware update? I'd like to be able to have a wired remote on the phones jack AND also send line-out OR spdif-out on the right hand jack.
that's about it for tech questions, for now
very nice player, fiio. and the fact that you send out 24/192 (and 96, 88.2, 176.4, etc) and don't ruin the output bitstream - nice - very nice. one of the main reasons I bought this was to have a bit-perfect non-resampled spdif out on a portable player.
thx
/bryan