Snowmass 3.06 Now Live

I even wiped the drive using the clean command on diskpart. I will try again later on. Trying to get my hands on another 4gb stick. Not very easy to find these days…

Did you downgrade to Yale? That seems to work for a lot of people.

I tried to downgrade to Torreys and Redcloud. Without any sucess. I will ceartainly try to Yale. Thanks!

I think a bigger one should work too. I was looking for good quality SD cards just to keep as spares for this but the smallest I could find (that were a good brand and not a rip off) were 8GB and there weren’t many of those either.

I have just figured it out. I had used this thumb drive to try HQPlayer Embedded. It had converted the partition map to GUID (it is a Linux based custom OS).

Then just reconverted the drive to MBR, and voilà.

Now to the music. Thanks all for the help. I sure hope my experience might help others

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Good. So are you actually using a thumb drive for updates? I thought it had to be SD cards.

For DS Junior it’s a thumb drive.

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Ok thanks I didn’t realise!

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This update doesn’t intentionally alter the sound. Its purpose is to fix a problem that was impacting people who use Linux-based transports (and I think only those connected via USB?). Any audible changes are accidental side-effects resulting from different electrical behaviours of supporting chips like the PIC or maybe the XMOS USB interface.

Quite a few people have reported that they hear a difference from these kinds of changes. 3.0.0, 3.0.4, 3.0.5 and now 3.0.6 are all said by some to sound different despite there being no alterations to the FGPA code which is where all the audio data manipulation takes place.

I upgraded from 3.0.0 to 3.0.6 out of curiosity. I think maybe it has reduced a bit of “digital audio” glare, but I wouldn’t swear to it. Still it makes me so curious to hear what Ted’s next super DAC will sound like with its extreme separation of analog from digital components.

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OK. I think it might be intriguing to do a poll for people to vote on which of the build versions they liked the best for music…Is there a general consensus? It wouldn’t make sense that every successive version automatically sounds ‘better’ than the last, or any other previous ones, right? There must be some variation in opinion. Maybe I missed the thread where this was already done?

There was a SMv1 vs. SMv2 poll when those were the only Snowmass versions:

Might be time for a new poll . . .

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POLL: DS Sr. owners who have compared at least two Snowmass versions, which is your favorite for sonics?:

  • SMv1 (3.0.0)
  • SMv2 (3.0.4)
  • SMv3 (3.0.5)
  • SMv4 (3.0.6)
  • I am on the fence between SMv1 (3.0.0) and SMv4 (3.0.6).
  • I do not hear differences between SM versions.
  • I hear differences between SM versions, but I do not have a clear favorite.

0 voters

I have been enjoying 3.0.5 since buying my DSD. At the moment I am listening to 3.0.0 due to all the positive comments about it. I have listened for an hour now to a variety of music and my fingers are itching to go back to 3.0.5, and then a try of 3.0.6. I do not understand why 3.0.6 would sound different than 3.0.5 if the FPGA portion was not altered.

3.0.0 sounds like 3.0.5 with the high end shelved at 8khz. To me at least. Kind of lifeless compared to what I am hearing with 3.0.5…

Edit a: I am back to 3.0.5 and it feels better already. I will listen a while and try 3.0.6…

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On balance, each new version for me has been an improvement. Haven’t given a full preview of
3.0.6 but I can not hear much difference, if any, between it and 3.0.5. I don’t stream with it so it
would follow that code fixes addressing this area would be lost on me, for now, unless Octave
becomes my Christmas gift.

Dang computers anyway…

Hi folks,

Long time off the forum.

Just to give some positive feedback on the update process.

Last time I updated the DSJ (USB stick) to 2.01, I had to go back to Yale > Snowmass.

This time, using the 2.01 SM, just inserted the USB stick with the 2.02 SM files, fired the DSJ up, and voilá. Although it remained with the blinking log a little bit longer than usual, it ended the update process without any issues. After that, I powered cycle it and good to go.

Sounding so darn good!

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They sound different because of the different noise patterns the pic code generates between each release

Maybe we need a way to adjust the noise patterns on the DAC, in order to fine tune our individual systems.

I had a weird problem with Snowmass 3.06.

After successfully upgrading to 3.06 the bridge audio was working just fine. I primarily play music through the bridge, but when I tried to play anything from my Windows 10 PC through USB, I was unable to get any sound. I did see the little green dot on the USB display of the DSD, so I knew that it was connected. I tried re-installing the PS Audio USB driver, I tried a different USB wire, but nothing would correct the problem.

Then I remembered, when I took the SD card out of the DSD, to load the 3.06 firmware, I noticed that the 3.04 firmware (the version that PS Audio shipped with the DSD) was not on the SD card. So now that 3.06 was installed, I turned everything off, deleted all of the files from the SD card, reinserted the SD card into the DSD, and powered it back on. Low and behold, I had USB audio again.

Is this some kind of bug, or is it a strange feature to prevent someone from leaving the firmware on the SD card, causing extended startup times? If this is a feature, it really shouldn’t disable the USB audio. Instead, it would be much nicer if it displayed some kind of message on the screen, requiring an acknowledgement instead.

If this is a bug, then I guess it won’t be too long before 3.07 is released. :wink:

I spoke too soon.

After playing audio over USB for about 1 minute or so, the audio went silent and I cannot seem to get it working again.

Anyone else running into this?