Unfortunately I am having a lot of issues with this DAC. I just created an account here in hope that I can receive some support, seeing that ifi looks to be very active in this thread. Please excuse me if there is a firmware fix for these problems out there already! I looked around and couldn't find any on the ifi website but I could be looking in the wrong places. Also apologies if this has been reported in this thread already, but I could not feasibly check all pages of the thread.
First, and the more minor issue, is that often when switching to a new song, the pro idsd takes a second or two to start playing and I miss the first couple seconds of the song. I find that this only happens with high res files, almost always only 24/192. Pressing play again usually works. This could be an issue with Roon but I haven't experienced it with any of my other dacs. This is a problem I can probably live with considering it never happens when letting playback naturally move to the next track, and only when explicitly pressing play to start a new song.
The next issue is a deal breaker and I will be returning the DAC if it can't be resolved with some kind of firmware fix very soon.
When playing ANY file with lower sampling rate, I am getting very audible random popping noises. I am able to reproduce this with both 16 and 24 bit, 44.1khz and 48khz. I have not been able to reproduce the popping with files of higher sampling rate. No matter which file I play, I will get 5-10 loud pops throughout the song at seemingly random points. I have been able to reproduce this on all digital filter and DSD upsampling combinations, including with no upsampling. I've reproduced the issue with 4 different headphones and 3 different amps. Switching out the Pro iDSD with my Mytek Brooklyn DAC+ and keeping everything else the exact same (except usb2 vs usb3 cable) makes the problem go away.
Is anyone else able to reproduce this issue?