I own hundreds of SACD’s which I play on my memory player with the directstream DAC without issue that sounds wonderful…as far as i understand these are DSD or at least it says so when I play it and on the packaging…I also play hi-rez downloads of FLAC 24-96 and 24-176 that also play without issue and sound wonderful…the other day I purchased a David Bowie DSD (Single Rate) 2.8MHz/64fs Download which I tried to play yesterday…While it did play there were all sorts of little pops and clicks in the background as the music played and as i indicated I have never had such an issue before and couldnt continue to listen to it…I am very confused as to why this particular download causes these problems while my other SACD’s which are DSD as well do not…I would appreciate any guidance here so i will know what i can and cannot purchase in the future…thanks much…let me add i played it using the bridge II connection and using roon
Put the Huron software on the DS DAC and see if that helps.
Do you have other DSD downloads that play in Roon via Bridge II that play cleanly?
You Roon Core machine could be reaching its limit and can’t keep up, hence the dropouts.
In Roon, if you click/touch the colored ‘star’ icon that shows next to the current track playing, a page will appear that shows the processing path along with a CPU ‘score’. If the ‘score’ is over 100 it won’t show but less than 100 will. You could be down in the <1.0 range and you’ll definitely get dropouts.
Here’s a pic of the little star and the screen that appears.
A little more detail might help figure things out:
How are you playing the downloaded file?
If you are putting it on media and playing it with the DMP, you might be running into a DMP issues.
If you are playing it without the DMP and the problem goes away when if you lower the volume on the DS, then you might be running into a DS Redcloud OS issues.
If you are playing it with the Bridge you might be running into a Bridge issue.
I am playing it via the bridge ,I have no such issues with my DMP and SACD DSD discs
How are you sending the file to the Bridge II? Roon?
i have the file on a hard drive on my network and use my ipad remotely in my living room to control it
The hard drive that stores the file, is it your Roon Core machine? It probably is. I presume someone helped you set this up?
Did you click on the little ‘star’ to see if the processing shown is in the single digits or less?
The roon is based off of my laptop and external drive housed in my bedroom. I use the iPad to control the bridge 2 in my living room
This is why I’m a 44.1/16 SPDIF guy. It’s bullet proof, works every time.
I had this issue too for a few hours. Not sure if it was a power issue that caused the bridge II to freak out, or some other MQA related issue that I was playing around with at the time via ROON. Regardless, I got static during DSD playback, and then also again when switching back to PCM. Playing the same files via Airplay to an Airport to the DSJR via optical did not have any issue. Seems like the bridge II can get hosed.
I had to power off the DSJR and unplug it from the power source for a few minutes. This seemed to clear things up. Now I just have the normal bridge II problems everyone else does: pops/clicks when switching between DSD and PCM, and unable to process full MQA from Roon when using volume leveling or sound processing. There is another thread(s) to fix these issues but the effort seems to be on the far back burner.
Edit: the other thing to try, that might have helped me (sorry wasn’t taking notes), is to set a DHCP address if you have a STATIC IP address assigned currently.
update, I lowered the volume on the DAC to 95 from 100 and turned the volume up a bit on the pre amp and the problem seems to go away or at least for the most part…interesting…i do hope ultimately there is a better fix then that but at least it appears to work this way for the time being!..thank you to all who tried to help
There you go, that’s the Redcloud bug. It’s been widely reported previously.
From what Ted has said you might want to go a bit lower on the volume if the problem hasn’t completely gone away. With the DS you are not throwing away any bits when you lower the volume.
Thanks I will experiment
good news, the terrific tech guys sent me what they said was a new variation of red cloud which i installed tonight and to my surprise and great pleasure it seems to have fixed the problem…i was able to keep the DAC at 100 without the popping and clicking i had been hearing…i will continue to test it but so far so good…thanks very much to the responsive tech guys
It would be really interesting to compare that build of red-cloud to the production build. I wonder if it actually sounds as good.
it sounds as good to me thus far
Would love to try that new version. I was listening over the weekend to DSD and honestly if you get a major pop and note the time and replay it there is no guarantee you will get the pop again. Not sure how that is possible…
I’m guessing that if support is only handing this out on such an exclusive basis that this build of redcloud must not been put through all of the extensive (and expensive) listening tests that the production build went through, or they would probably have released it to everybody by now.
Either that, or they are afraid of versionitis impacting red-cloud like it did with some of their earlier releases where some people preferred the Betas over the released builds.