[kr0gg]

hm. i was thinking of building an HTPC with SSD because i thought it would make an improvement to the sound. maybe i'm mistaken
why do you consider it a "massive headache"?

 

[drez]

I got a vertex 3 and the firmware it came with was unstable.  And it cannot be flashed from the windows disk you have booted from.  And it need to be in atchi mode in the bios for the flash to work.  And this this was a pain to resolve esp as this is my workstation also and the bad firmware causes BSOD.
 
bit of a pain really.

 

[drez]

OK so I have picked up the pattern in the dropouts - they tend to occur at some point, say an hour, after DI has been plugged in and playing music.  When dropouts start they become frequent, like once every couple of minutes.  Changing music player has no effect.  Unplugging DI and plugging back in gives another period without dropouts.  This pattern occurs with both windows WASAPI and terlink ASIO drivers.  Dropouts are not linked to any measurable computer performance criteria that I know of - not hard pagefaults, not latency spikes, no further troubleshooting can be done with regards to OS and computer hardware.  This malfunction is independent of whichever USB port is used.  The one final test to perform is to use a second computer with the DI to attempt to reproduce this behavior.  Very annoying.

 

[kr0gg]

uhm.. sounds like an overheating issue?

 

[drez]

I don't think its overheating - it happens even when the power supply is in a different location or switched off.  I am currently testing with a laptop I have here.  Hopefully that will shed some light on the issue.
 
EDIT: well running the DI from a laptop with an isolator still has dropouts - I haven't optimised this laptop for audio playback, using DS etc but at this moment I really cant be bothered digging through this laptops settings as it has an irritatingly small touchpad.  Needless to say same deal goes for the laptop - the DI streams fine for a while and then starts having dropouts.  i will test further, as I fear AGD repairs troubleshooting department aren't so crash hot.  I will also send this around to other for testing once I source an alternative transport.
 
As for my current guess as to what is going wrong - I am not really qualified to guess but one thing for sure is that I am at my wits end with regards to troubleshooting this cursed device.

 

[svyr]

>Dropouts are not linked to any measurable computer performance criteria that I know of - not hard pagefaults, not latency spikes, no further troubleshooting can be done with regards to OS and computer hardware. This malfunction is independent of whichever USB port is used. The one final test to perform is to use a second computer with the DI to attempt to reproduce this behavior. Very annoying.

how about vanilla disk access/disk load. I've mentioned how to get a measure on that above.

 

[drez]

I doubt disk use is the cause due to the pattern in which the problem occurs, but I will check disk I/O activity next time the problem occurs.  In any case there is nothing I can really do about disk I/O activity, I have stripped down my windows install to bare essentials, I am running a sata 3 SSD and have experimented with all windows paging configurations to no avail.

 

[shadowlord]

i read a few pages back that you can improve 44,1khz material playback by removing the clock for the upsampling frequencies.
was this experienced by other members as well?
 
i tried removing the clock but without the possibility to A/B it's hard to tell if there is a improvement.

 

[sfogar]

Hi,
 
> OK so I have picked up the pattern in the dropouts - they tend to occur at some point, say an hour, after DI has been plugged in and playing music.  
> When dropouts start they become frequent, like once every couple of minutes.  Changing music player has no effect. 
 
can confirm this, happens for me too...
 
All the best
 
AF

 

[drez]

Good to know so I don't go nuts with troubleshooting.  Given this my guess is that it has something to do with the driver and windows 7's WASAPI ( which also affects teradacs ASIO driver for some reason).
 
I'm currently testing Jriver's 'event style' WASAPI output to see if that improves things, not that I like the Jriver sound (its solid and punchy but not especially detailed or delicate - not ideal for classical)
 
EDIT: aaand no jriver event style wasapi doesn't help.  Honestly at this point I am not going to spend any more money trying to get this transport to work properly.

 

[kr0gg]

drez, did you try writing to Kingwa?

 

[tim3320070]

Well, it seems I have a similar system (Win7) but I am using MediaMonkey with no drop outs using standard settings.

 

[somestranger26]

Quote:

i read a few pages back that you can improve 44,1khz material playback by removing the clock for the upsampling frequencies.
was this experienced by other members as well?
 
i tried removing the clock but without the possibility to A/B it's hard to tell if there is a improvement.

 
I never read anything saying that. The clock is unused when playing 44.1khz so it shouldn't matter.
 
Quote:

OMILEX USB isolator arrived.  To me the sound without being red the DI power supply smears the imaging quite a bit, but is much better with the DI power supply feeding the isolator.  Let's hope it fixes the dropouts 'cos I'm at wit's end with OS optimisation, and this SSD sin't much better (massive headache). 
 
EDIT: Isolator does not stop dropouts.  I will be looking for an alternative transport.

Nobody said that it would. I only get dropouts near midnight when they're messing with the AC frequency. Occasionally while using MPCHC with WASAPI output, but foobar and other programs are fine. My DI runs 24/7.
 

 

[drez]

@sfogar when did you buy your DI?  
 
I mean it could be power irregularities affecting the PC but the cyclical nature of the problem has me baffled - the ID, USB controller and NFB-10 are all running from a power regenerator which will filter out any power irregularities - but the PC power supply also has it's own DC voltage regulation circuitry which should [and has been measure to] fix any transient voltage irregularities (ie. no matter what voltage is being fed into the PC the PSU I have should put same voltage into 12V, 5V, 3V.)  Given this I think it's fair to say that my system is in theory immune to wall power anomalies.  I'm not sure how well the PSU fixes fast rise-time voltage irregularities - but I'm guessing the caps in the design should filter these out.  Either way I can get a PSU tester to check this next week, but again I seriously doubt that it is power supply related.
 
i wouldn't be suprised if all those affected by regular/cyclical dropout behavior bough DI's from the same batch/revision...
 
a friend of mine with same dropout problem has contacted Kingwa and he couldn't help.  Same guy has a NFB-10 ES fed from the same USB port which runs without dropouts (I think that also runs an adaptive USB implementation, probably TE7022 also.)  interesting huh.

 

[drez]

I think I found a potential culprit - dropouts went mad the minute I reinstalled acrobat X pro...  Worth a try blocking and shutting down all adobe services anyway, maybe I will just use third party acrobat if that fails.