If this is covered somewhere else, let’s move this to the right spot on the forum.
I have one “feature request” that I’d find useful:
Ted, is there any way to provide an option to darken the display entirely unless there is input from the remote? Even at the lowest setting for the display, in a dark room, the DAC still beams out pretty strongly.
I’d like to see, “High, Medium, Low, Off” as options for display brightness. But if I adjust the volume from the remote, the display will come on to, say, Low, then black out again after ‘n’ seconds. Then again, that might be tricky to get to the settings and such if there is not display, or could cause confusion if you forget if the unit is on or off.
I’m glad this thread exists, because I have a suggestion but not one I felt was worthy of starting a whole new thread.
Don’t own a DS yet. Rather I’m dreaming about what it would be like to have one, and that’s where this suggestion comes from.
My system would be: Mac mini with BitPerfect or Audirvana -> USB cable -> DirectStream DAC. Now while I don’t mind queuing up music using the iTunes Remote app or maybe on the Mac directly, when it comes to play/pause and skipping tracks I’d much prefer to use the same remote which controls the volume. That is to say, the PS Audio infrared one that comes with the DAC.
So the request for Ted and/or Paul to consider:
Would you be able to make the DS USB hardware emulate a keyboard with multimedia keys for play/pause, next and previous tracks? And could you send the “keystroke” to the computer when the DAC is playing audio from USB and the user presses the equivalent buttons on the IR remote?
That’s possibly easier than what I’ve requested, since external volume adjustment is a standard option that can be exposed by USB Audio Class compliant devices, of which the DS is one. But if we had to choose between my request and yours I’d be sticking to my guns.
crabby said
How about the ability to control the volume via foobar or j.river?
I was just wishing for this last weekend. I was running things off my Android with Foobar Control while I was cooking, and I got mad when I realized I needed to get that cheesy clickity remote to manage the volume difference between albums.
I was also very pleasantly surprised when Foobar paused playback automatically when a call came in. So simple, yet made me very happy.
I would like the DS to give me some kind of information about how much and/or how often it’s having to vary its master clock rate to maintain pace with the incoming data stream, especially on the I2S, optical, coax and XLR inputs where an external clock is involved.
Perhaps a single figure such as the total accumulated clock skew magnitude (ignoring direction) in the past ten seconds, or something like that. It’s hopefully not too hard to generate and display, and it’s easy to interpret: the closer to zero, the more stable the output. It might also be interesting to get an indication of average input buffer levels (in millisecs) over the same period.
