[Halluci]

So for the past 4 months or so, I've been having intermittent problems when playing music through foobar2000 (using wasapi and usb out to a Headroom ultra desktop amp/dac) where after several hours of playing music, foobar will randomly freeze up. Pressing pause and then playing results in the music stuttering and skipping really badly, but moving the seek bar even just a little bit fixes the problem and playback continues as normal. I initially assumed this was a problem with the buffer, and I tried shortening the buffer to 200ms but I'd still get the random freezing problem.

This doesn't really happen often enough to be a real problem though, so I just decided that it was probably the fault of my computer which is getting a bit old.

Last week however, on three separate occasions, I would be listening to music and the right channel would suddenly fade out and merge into the left channel, effectively piping both channels to the left driver of my headphones causing large amounts of distortion in the process. I quickly shut down my amp, checked if it was running hot (it wasn't), and when I turned it back on, it would be fine again.

This new problem is definitely a problem with my amp or dac; and I have a nagging feeling that the foobar problems are also caused by my dac rather than my computer since everything used to work fine and there are no errors in foobar's log. Anyone have any idea what might be the malfunctioning part in my amp, and what I can do to fix it?

 

[carton132]

It might be hard to replicate if it's still rare, but do you have access to another computer for some testing? If the problem happens again after hooking up to another rig you could be certain that the problem is in the DAC and take the repair from there. Try another USB cable too, before opening up the DAC.

You will probably end up confirming your suspicions, but it could be a cheap way to eliminate some variables at least.