Well, there is no question that Oleg's words have been harsh, not to mention that his limited mastery of the english language has made it hard to understand some of his points, but in all fairness, I think he gets it right that there is a little bit of fanboyism going on here, and more generally on any S***** Audio thread. There's nothing wrong with loving a product/company and voice it on public forums, but when actual information becomes a casualty of all this noise, it is a bit annoying/unfair to honest, current and potential customers out there that are just looking at objective, fact-checked information.
I'm sorry but when I read that my $600 DAC has a rate switching bugs, multibit+<insert-buzzword-here> or not, I'm a little worried. Even if power-cycling the device as a temporary fix doesn't seem like a major pain, it kinda is considering the price tag and the lack of remote (I know, I'm lazy, but I hate it when I have to leave the sofa to reboot anything). Fair enough, a world of today is surrounded with buggy devices, but that's tolerable as long as it is software that can be updated, buggy hardware is IMHO a very different thing, especially for that kind of money.
Let's summarize the current state of the problem and the proposed fixes according to this thread:
A. The problem
- Changing sample/bit rate while streaming to the device can sometimes lead to garbled/distorted sound
B. Working solutions
- Power-cycling: always
- Switching source: sometimes
C. Non-working (aka BS) solutions
- Microsoft pseudo-science: I'm talking about all the messages supporting the idea that software can be fixed by uninstalling/reinstalling/rebooting.
- Self-healing hardware: needs to be mentioned even though I'm almost embarrassed to. The theory that the device self-heals after XXX hours, sort of thanks to a magical "burn-in" process. I find it concerning that an official sponsor actually supports the existence of this very phenomenon in this thread (on Nov 18)
Btw, I know the manufacturer communicated a low percentage of similar issues reported, but I would take it with a grain of salt: in the wonderful world of support, few people dare to report, and out of those who do not report anything are a majority of people who do not use a certain problematic feature (e.g: rate switching). I hope not but It's still entirely possible that this issue affects all the devices :/
Just my 2 cents