Four weeks in and *finally* getting some good sound out of the damn thing. That's after changing over to dual PC's linked together with fibre optic cards, cables and a switch (the latter arrived yesterday).
Evidently my single PC wasn't cutting it previously because there was a warm colouration and a cloudy forwardness that didn't sound particularly linear. It's now dramatically more open and clear.
The X20 is a fine tool for telling you all about the rest of your system downstream. The bad news is that it needs to in order because the DAC will tell you all about it
Interesting stuff ...
I was thinking about building a little dedicated audio PC round an
ASRock N3150T Quad Core USB 3 Mini ITX Motherboard. Mainly because
it's easy to power from an external linear power source. Then adding
a PPA (or similar) usb card to it as well.
Now I'm wondering if the Intel N3150 1.6 Ghz chip may not pack enough
horsepower to run everything 100% smoothly ? It manages 1584 on PassMark.
What SoC's are you running ?
On my i7 system cpu use rarely gets above single figures when running foobar.
Which is why I thought something like a N3150 based PC would be fine, despite
being 4 or 5 times less powerful.
However, it does seem strange that you got such an alteration in the character of
the sound. I'd have thought you'd get clipping and stuttering rather than an
actual change in the quality of sound if there were processing issues.
Then again computers often seem to have a random and very frustrating mind
of their own at times, as I'm sure we've all experienced on various occasions !!
Anyway, I'm glad you're finally beginning to enjoy your X20
Cheers
Simon