USB Audio and Computer Audio

[sharky]

In my midi audio setup my macbook pro running mavericks does go up to 192.




But then you'll notice that 48k is selected though. That's because I don't use any player that is system dependent, so I really don't care which setting I have there

Just as examples, 2 players (one free and one commercial)

Vox (free) (link)





J. River (commercial with 30-day trial) (link)





Can you try using a system-independent player (Vox is a really small download) and see what kind of behaviour you get?
Also, try connecting the DC-1 to a different USB port (I know it sounds stupid but I have a graphics tablet that only works in one USB port). I don't have that problem with the DC-1 but, you never know.

Cheers,

[mz]

Try to disconnect and reconnect USB cable, without powering anything off.
Let us know if the rates in midi setup go all the way to 192k after that,

[eyeba11kid]

Thank you! That's worked. Up to 192/24. I will try one the recommended players. Thanks again !

[lsdeep]

for everybody looking for a media center software i would like to recommend xbmc (XBMC homepage) at this point once again. xbmc made big improvements on their audio engine lately. the stable v12 version allows for bitperfect in v13b4 it gets even more improved. another big point is, it is open source (translate to free, which is hard to beat) and available for all major OS. 
i have to admit, as linux user i am more limited than win or mac users in terms of media software. jriver for linux is a still very buggy beta, with good improvements. but using my wifes win laptop, i have a hard time to see major advantages for either jriver or xbmc (besides the free!). i tried many of the linux audio players and media software, some i personally don't like (nothing really wrong with them technically). but, the main issue for most of them (in my case) is the limited ability to work with large databases (crashes, freezes while operating or adding files). now i admit not everybody tries to feed them 70.000 albums, but the weakness seems to be for most of the media software the database integration. neither jriver nor xbmc gave me any problems to that end so far.


cheers, L

[navybuck]

I am looking for a solution for the XMC 1 since it does not have a ethernet connection to allow a NAS to serve the files. I have an Oppo 103 which can serve the purpose, but I am looking for something else that will allow me to connect to the NAS with wired ethernet and then feed the signal into the XMC. The Sonore Rendu looks pretty slick, but also pretty pricey. I must say I am very impressed with the way the Marantz NR1604 effortlessly connects to the server and for that reason I have been looking at a Marantz 7701 pre-amp instead of he XMC 1. But since I have a 40% discount card I would like to stick with Emotiva if I can find a reasonably proced solution.

[lsdeep]

Apr 29, 2014 13:03:49 GMT -5 navybuck said:

I am looking for a solution for the XMC 1 since it does not have a ethernet connection to allow a NAS to serve the files. I have an Oppo 103 which can serve the purpose, but I am looking for something else that will allow me to connect to the NAS with wired ethernet and then feed the signal into the XMC. The Sonore Rendu looks pretty slick, but also pretty pricey. I must say I am very impressed with the way the Marantz NR1604 effortlessly connects to the server and for that reason I have been looking at a Marantz 7701 pre-amp instead of he XMC 1. But since I have a 40% discount card I would like to stick with Emotiva if I can find a reasonably proced solution.

i have no personal experience with it yet, but maybe something like a raspberry pi (amazon) could do that for you.

cheers, L

[romi]

Apr 29, 2014 13:03:49 GMT -5 navybuck said:

I am looking for a solution for the XMC 1 since it does not have a ethernet connection to allow a NAS to serve the files. I have an Oppo 103 which can serve the purpose, but I am looking for something else that will allow me to connect to the NAS with wired ethernet and then feed the signal into the XMC. The Sonore Rendu looks pretty slick, but also pretty pricey. I must say I am very impressed with the way the Marantz NR1604 effortlessly connects to the server and for that reason I have been looking at a Marantz 7701 pre-amp instead of he XMC 1. But since I have a 40% discount card I would like to stick with Emotiva if I can find a reasonably proced solution.

I'm looking for a similar thing, at the same time I'm wondering if the XMC-1 will have Media rendering capabilities, i.e. be able to connect to DNLA devices /servers directly ?
Any idea if this is going to be part of the XMC-1  Gen 2 ?

Otherwise I would opt for an Mini Mac/barebone PC with according SW and a way to control it remotely (e.g. TeamViewer). This way I can hide the Mac/PC somwhere behind my audio equipment and control it from my hearing spot by tablet or smartphone.

[Deleted]

Some random thoughts and observations on USB/DAC audio.  My DAC journey, if you will.

I have only recently bought my first higher than CD (44.1/16 bit) resolution audio. I bought my XDA-2 around the turn of the year (2013-2014), and I am only getting around to really start enjoying my 2 channel setup. One reason it has taken me a while is I have been trying to settle on decent software as my music server (operating system/player) etc. I am trying to avoid the need to go out an buy a new mid to high power laptop etc. A lot of relatively low power machines should be adequate for music playing at least up to 96/24 audio, that is if the machine is properly setup for dedicated to music playback. I have two spare netbooks, one of which should serve fine as a music only machine. To that end I have been looking toward a Linux based operating system to run my as music machine. Currently, the choices in Linux are limited and still fairly new. If you want to check out possibilities check out the following website: www.thewelltemperedcomputer.com/Linux/Distro.htm.

The thing about the possibilities with the Linux distros (fancy way of calling each flavor of Linux OS) is that the goal is a lightweight OS specifically set up for low system latency and with very little in the way of background applications running. This kind of setup means low powered machines should be able to perform admirably for the sole purpose of music playback. You may not get a fancy interface or even visualizations, just good playback. All of the Linux distros have interfaced with with the XDA-2 out of the box as it were. Some of the distros can be booted from a USB flash drive or SDHC card without ever installing the system on the machine and will run just fine.

I started out with Audiophile Linux. I installed Version 2 a few months ago. It was glitchy but did provide good playback and it used a player that was supposed to have Foobar 2000 type addons (such as an equalizer). I just could not get get it boot and perform without regular glitches and found it to be user unfriendly. This put my playing on halt for a while. A few weeks ago I tried a newer version of Audiophile Linux, but the new version, although easy to install, was not easy from the standpoint of linking to music on the internal drives or loading music into the internal drives (you would need to open a terminal (like the windows c prompt) to do a lot of things – not cool). I do think though that when newer versions come up this Linux distro will mature.

In the past 1-2 weeks I have tired OpenElec which is a flavor of XMBC for Linux. Most of you have probably heard of XMBC and if you are an audiophile will probably roll your eyes a bit. OpenElec just recently released the latest version which based on the latest XBMC (which has a totally revamped audio engine). My problem is that I was starting to get occasional split second audio dropouts on 96/24 audio. I could not determine if it was a glitch with the hard drive or Ethernet connection or what. I was kind of hoping I could connect it to a cheap HD TV for visualizations and remotely controlling it with a nice large display. I think for XBMC to be glitch free I would probably need to invest in a more powerful machine. For me in the end this will not work. It is a shame since the OpenElec distro boots in about 20 seconds, and the sound was overall very good.

I moved on to trying Daphile. This one is working nicely. I am able to boot it directly off of a SDHC flash card. I can control the play with my laptop with their built in Internet interface. Daphile is designed to be truly headless. One it is booted you fully control it over the web based interface which is based on the Sqeezebox interface. Its interface is a bit slower then the XMBC web interface but is more flexible and works well. The boot time for Daphile is about 10-15 seconds slower than OpenElec.

I find the Daphile sound to be a bit more detailed, but the sound out of OpenElec provided a slightly better spaciousness. However, I have had not problems with audio dropout with the Daphile distro, so I think I will be sticking with Daphile for a while. I do not have any plug ins for equalization control, but that may come in the near future.

For both OpenElec I could shut down my netbook with their web interface and remotely start the machine up via ethernet. Very nice.

The audiophile distros are fairly new and still in early versions. The cool thing is the software is free, so you can try new ones out without too much heartache.

There are other distros geared toward the newer very small form factor embedded PCs (Raspberry PI, Cubox), which are generally ARM based systems which will not work for my netbook. The highest end Cubox (only 2” by 2”) is only $139, IR receiver and IR blaster, quad core processor, Wi-fi, gigabit Ethernet, HMDI, 2 USB ports, spdif, and is a very low watt user. These types of machines are still in their infancy, but I may eventually go to one of these.

The cool thing is my current 2 channel rig has been relatively inexpensive. My 40 year old Fortura 8 Heils cost me $90 when I bought then from a brother of mine about 30 years ago (he replaced them with the original Carver Amazing Loudspeakers). I have put about $400 of work into my Fortura 8's in the past few years, including recently dropping in new Dayton 8” woofer (about $60 total) which are working fabulously well in the old Fortura 8s. My XDA-2 was $250, and two B-stock XPA-100s were $300 each. Add the cost of some interconnects and a surge protector and I have a nice sounding system.

I had asked myself why can't the DAC play from USB drives directly. I thought it through and the answer boils down to selecting music. The DAC's job is to just interpret the 1's and 0's for analog output. To play off of a USB drive would require an interface for selecting folders, artists, songs, etc. A PC, laptop, server or headless unit is just better equipped to do that task.

[bene]

This is a useful thread. The USB problems between my mac and my XDA-2 are annoying. I don't really know whether my mac or my XDA-2 is to blame. Now, one thing that occurred to me this morning is that the USB cable I'm using does not have a ferrite core whereas almost all the other DACs I've used come with a USB cable that has a ferrite core. Could this be an issue? Should I look to replace the cable I'm using with a cable with a ferrite core? Or maybe I should look into an even higher quality cable?

The problems I am having:
* My mac will read the XDA-2's capabilities as 41.1 and 48 kHz (fairly random, but almost always happens after the computer's gone to sleep)
• Audio program will hang when changing between music with different bitrates (say, from 44.1 to 192)or won't play high bitrate music - the fix is to switch USB socket.
• No audio. Sometimes the mac "thinks" it's communicating with the XDA-2 -- music appears to be playing -- but the XDA-2 does not "think" it's receiving any information (bitrate doesn't show up on display)

I should also mention that I use Audirvana Plus (1.5.12) as my media player.


(Please do not try to troubleshoot these issues here. My question is about USB cables. I don't want to divert from the thread's purpose.)

[drtrey3]

Rats bene. My daughter is a mac user and she wanted me to hear some new music she is listening to. I plugged a cheap ass cable from the XDA-2 to the Mac, set it as the output device on the Mac, and we were off to the races with no problems at all. And it sounded better than it should have!

Trey

[bene]

Were you playing high bitrate files? When the computer reads only 41.1 and 48 kHz, both bitrates will play.

[drtrey3]

bene, these were all compressed files. I was just impressed that it was plug and play.

Trey

[KeithL]

Cables....

The purpose of a ferrite bead on a USB cable is to block very high frequency (RF) interference. It can both prevent RF from leaking into the device through the cable, and prevent the cable and the device from radiating excess RF into the air (all computers and high frequency switching devices generate some RF noise). A ferrite bead could help - by preventing interference, or it could hurt - by reducing the high frequency response of the cable too much. Which result you get will depend on way too many things to figure out for sure - and each ferrite bead and cable is different anyway. The best advice there is "it couldn't hurt to try". (You can even buy snap-on, removable, ferrite filter beads from many electronic supply houses to try with the cables you already have.)

As for the cables themselves, I would always recommend using a high-quality cable - by which I mean a nice, gold plated, USB 2.0 rated, heavy duty commercial cable. (Belkin and Amazon make nice ones, as do many others; Amazon gets about $10 for two meters. I would definitely avoid really old cables that might only be USB 1.0 rated, and really thin ones which might have poor shielding or too-thin wires inside. Of course, we sell some very nice ones too - and they're not at all expensive.) Beyond that, most of the "audiophile" USB cables out there are pure snake oil, and some of them don't even work as well as a $10 Amazon Basics equivalent.

Many of the occasional issues you describe MIGHT go away if you use a shorter or different cable (if you're running over two meters, try a shorter one). Others, like the failure to work properly after the computer wakes from hibernation, are computer related - although they only seem to happen on certain computers and/or certain software. (These are basically a slight "flakyness" in USB itself, which just happen to be more noticeable with audio. However, since many USB problems occur because USB is very critical about signal timing, even if the problem isn't CAUSED by the cable, a different cable may not exhibit it - or may not exhibit it as badly.)

However, don't waste your money trying "high-priced premium audiophile cables" - simply buy three or four "good, heavy duty, commercial cables"... it always pays to have a few different ones to try. Other than the usual mystical claims, there really isn't much that a USB cable, at any price, can do better than any other - as long as both meet spec. (What I would do is go on Amazon, punch up "USB cables", and pick out two or three different ones in the $10 to $15 range. Personally, I tend to prefer nice heavy-ish ones, with gold plating - which couldn't hurt, and I rather like black ones without writing on them. As long as you avoid the silly expensive ones, you'll find lots of choices - literally thousands - in that price range.)

Incidentally, in case anybody was wondering, there is no official "USB audio cable standard"... ALL USB cables are data cables - USB audio is just data. The standard for USB 2.0 is quite stringent, and requires FAR more performance for use with a USB hard drive than you could ever need for USB audio. Although it's POSSIBLE that a certain fancy cable COULD be wired, or wrapped, or twisted, in a way which could work better with a certain DAC, with a certain input circuit, and still meet the basic USB standard, I've honestly never seen it happen. (I would again warn, though, that many uber-expensive "audiophile USB cables" DO NOT meet the basic USB standard, and so are actually far INFERIOR to even a $10 one from Amazon, and may NOT work properly - or at all. Many expensive, exotic, and even esoteric materials simply don't work very well... )

May 21, 2014 11:19:06 GMT -5 bene said:

This is a useful thread. The USB problems between my mac and my XDA-2 are annoying. I don't really know whether my mac or my XDA-2 is to blame. Now, one thing that occurred to me this morning is that the USB cable I'm using does not have a ferrite core whereas almost all the other DACs I've used come with a USB cable that has a ferrite core. Could this be an issue? Should I look to replace the cable I'm using with a cable with a ferrite core? Or maybe I should look into an even higher quality cable?

The problems I am having:
* My mac will read the XDA-2's capabilities as 41.1 and 48 kHz (fairly random, but almost always happens after the computer's gone to sleep)
• Audio program will hang when changing between music with different bitrates (say, from 44.1 to 192)or won't play high bitrate music - the fix is to switch USB socket.
• No audio. Sometimes the mac "thinks" it's communicating with the XDA-2 -- music appears to be playing -- but the XDA-2 does not "think" it's receiving any information (bitrate doesn't show up on display)

I should also mention that I use Audirvana Plus (1.5.12) as my media player.


(Please do not try to troubleshoot these issues here. My question is about USB cables. I don't want to divert from the thread's purpose.)

[bene]

Thank you, Keith. I had the thought about the ferrite bead because my microstreamer is out on my desk at the moment and the cable that comes with that has a bead. HRT uses monoprice cables, which are pretty decent in about the range you are talking about. The cable I'm using with the XDA-2 was around $10 from Amazon. It's a 1 meter cable. I can't remember who made it - there are no markings on the casing. It is not gold plated though. I think I'll take your advice and try out a few more cables. The Belkin recommendation is good. I've got a few of their cables (RCA connectors, that sort of thing) and they are all really nice quality.  I'm not about to buy a cable that costs as much as or more than my XDA-2!

[Deleted]

Additional thoughts on my foray into higher definition audio.

I downloaded HDTracks' 2014 sampler (www.hdtracks.com/free-highres-sample/).

This sampler has a mixture of tracks in 96/24, 88.4/24, and 44.1/24 format. I chose to download in Flac format. The HDTracks web page I referenced above does not indicate what resolution each file is (I only noticed the mix of formats after the files were downloaded). The sound quality of all of the tracks are very good, even the 44.1/24 tracks.

After a couple of days of getting familiar with the HDTracks sampler pack, I decided to save copies of the files in Flac format converted to 16 bit format (96/24 to 48/16, 88.4/24, to 44.1/16, 44.1/24 to 44.1/16). For all of the conversions, I had a very hard time hearing a difference between the 24 bit and the 16 bit version. I decided there was slight edge for all of the 24 bit versions, but that could be a biased conclusion. The difference was marginal to essentially negligible on a couple of the tracks.

Part of the reason I converted the sample tracks to 16 bit was so I could play these tracks on my car's Kenwood KMM-100U head unit, which only supports Flac files up to 48/16 resolution.  I can say that the quality of the HDTracks sample pack tracks (converted to 16 bit) sound very good on my car's audio system. The quality of the tracks versus the rest of my music tracks (99% of which are sourced from standard 44.1/16 CDs) was readily apparent.

My experience with high resolution music formats is currently still limited so I am not sure my conclusions mean much at this point. It seems a well mastered high resolution format will sound very good even if the the higher resolution is only 44.1/24, and a very good sounding higher resolution format file will likely still sound just as good (at least to my ears) if converted and saved to a more standard 16 bit format.

For PCM recordings, my ears are telling me that the bit depth (at least from source of the recording) will for me be more important to the sound quality than the sample rate.

Here is a good web page for finding free sample high resolution music files:
hifiduino.wordpress.com/free-hi-res-music/

I am likely purchase Rush's Sector 1, 2 and 3, off of HDTracks this weekend. They have a code for 10% off everything this weekend. With the discount, I will be able to get the equivalent of 18 CD's worth of music in 96/24 format for $90-95.

[bene]

Back again! So, I finally had a look at what cable I actually bought and maybe it's not a very good one. It's $2.50 now, but was around $5 when I bought it. Either way, I thought it was at least a bit more! Here's the cable: amzn.to/1iLPOSv
Since this may not be an ideal cable, I started looking for new ones, but I'm finding it difficult to locate a good quality cable that's less than 4ft long. I decided I'd stop by here and ask for recommendations. I may just get this over and done with and order one from Emotiva. At least then I won't constantly wonder about the quality!

[KeithL]

It doesn't take a massive amount of processing power to play music - but a lot of that depends on the other hardware.
I'm also not convinced that Linux is especially friendlier than plain old Windows.

I have an old Gateway laptop; it's a single-core Celeron 1.7 gHz, with 1 gB of RAM (pretty pathetic by today's standards), but it does have an SSD.

It's quite able to play 24/192 files from a USB hard drive using FooBar2000 without stuttering at all.
(I don't use any of the limited visualizations that FooBar2000 offers.)

I believe XMBC is rather heavy in terms of power requirements.

May 16, 2014 20:40:54 GMT -5 @joebbathehut said:

Some random thoughts and observations on USB/DAC audio.  My DAC journey, if you will.

I have only recently bought my first higher than CD (44.1/16 bit) resolution audio. I bought my XDA-2 around the turn of the year (2013-2014), and I am only getting around to really start enjoying my 2 channel setup. One reason it has taken me a while is I have been trying to settle on decent software as my music server (operating system/player) etc. I am trying to avoid the need to go out an buy a new mid to high power laptop etc. A lot of relatively low power machines should be adequate for music playing at least up to 96/24 audio, that is if the machine is properly setup for dedicated to music playback. I have two spare netbooks, one of which should serve fine as a music only machine. To that end I have been looking toward a Linux based operating system to run my as music machine. Currently, the choices in Linux are limited and still fairly new. If you want to check out possibilities check out the following website: www.thewelltemperedcomputer.com/Linux/Distro.htm.

The thing about the possibilities with the Linux distros (fancy way of calling each flavor of Linux OS) is that the goal is a lightweight OS specifically set up for low system latency and with very little in the way of background applications running. This kind of setup means low powered machines should be able to perform admirably for the sole purpose of music playback. You may not get a fancy interface or even visualizations, just good playback. All of the Linux distros have interfaced with with the XDA-2 out of the box as it were. Some of the distros can be booted from a USB flash drive or SDHC card without ever installing the system on the machine and will run just fine.

I started out with Audiophile Linux. I installed Version 2 a few months ago. It was glitchy but did provide good playback and it used a player that was supposed to have Foobar 2000 type addons (such as an equalizer). I just could not get get it boot and perform without regular glitches and found it to be user unfriendly. This put my playing on halt for a while. A few weeks ago I tried a newer version of Audiophile Linux, but the new version, although easy to install, was not easy from the standpoint of linking to music on the internal drives or loading music into the internal drives (you would need to open a terminal (like the windows c prompt) to do a lot of things – not cool). I do think though that when newer versions come up this Linux distro will mature.

In the past 1-2 weeks I have tired OpenElec which is a flavor of XMBC for Linux. Most of you have probably heard of XMBC and if you are an audiophile will probably roll your eyes a bit. OpenElec just recently released the latest version which based on the latest XBMC (which has a totally revamped audio engine). My problem is that I was starting to get occasional split second audio dropouts on 96/24 audio. I could not determine if it was a glitch with the hard drive or Ethernet connection or what. I was kind of hoping I could connect it to a cheap HD TV for visualizations and remotely controlling it with a nice large display. I think for XBMC to be glitch free I would probably need to invest in a more powerful machine. For me in the end this will not work. It is a shame since the OpenElec distro boots in about 20 seconds, and the sound was overall very good.

I moved on to trying Daphile. This one is working nicely. I am able to boot it directly off of a SDHC flash card. I can control the play with my laptop with their built in Internet interface. Daphile is designed to be truly headless. One it is booted you fully control it over the web based interface which is based on the Sqeezebox interface. Its interface is a bit slower then the XMBC web interface but is more flexible and works well. The boot time for Daphile is about 10-15 seconds slower than OpenElec.

I find the Daphile sound to be a bit more detailed, but the sound out of OpenElec provided a slightly better spaciousness. However, I have had not problems with audio dropout with the Daphile distro, so I think I will be sticking with Daphile for a while. I do not have any plug ins for equalization control, but that may come in the near future.

For both OpenElec I could shut down my netbook with their web interface and remotely start the machine up via ethernet. Very nice.

The audiophile distros are fairly new and still in early versions. The cool thing is the software is free, so you can try new ones out without too much heartache.

There are other distros geared toward the newer very small form factor embedded PCs (Raspberry PI, Cubox), which are generally ARM based systems which will not work for my netbook. The highest end Cubox (only 2” by 2”) is only $139, IR receiver and IR blaster, quad core processor, Wi-fi, gigabit Ethernet, HMDI, 2 USB ports, spdif, and is a very low watt user. These types of machines are still in their infancy, but I may eventually go to one of these.

The cool thing is my current 2 channel rig has been relatively inexpensive. My 40 year old Fortura 8 Heils cost me $90 when I bought then from a brother of mine about 30 years ago (he replaced them with the original Carver Amazing Loudspeakers). I have put about $400 of work into my Fortura 8's in the past few years, including recently dropping in new Dayton 8” woofer (about $60 total) which are working fabulously well in the old Fortura 8s. My XDA-2 was $250, and two B-stock XPA-100s were $300 each. Add the cost of some interconnects and a surge protector and I have a nice sounding system.

I had asked myself why can't the DAC play from USB drives directly. I thought it through and the answer boils down to selecting music. The DAC's job is to just interpret the 1's and 0's for analog output. To play off of a USB drive would require an interface for selecting folders, artists, songs, etc. A PC, laptop, server or headless unit is just better equipped to do that task.

[KeithL]

That first problem is a known Mac-ism.

If the inability to operate at above 48k is truly random, then it is often due to a less-than-ideal cable or port, and, if so, using a shorter cable or a different port might cure it (this happens with both PCs and Macs). However, if it only happens when the computer wakes up from hibernation, then this is a known issue with Macs (apparently they sometimes don't bother to re-synch with other USB devices when they wake from hibernation). The only answer to it that we know of is to configure your Mac to do a full boot and not hibernate.

There is no specific reason why a ferrite bead on the USB cable should be required (the main purpose of the bead is to prevent noise from radiating out from the cable or into the device to which it is connected from outside), but it MIGHT help; and sometimes certain cables simply work better than others (even if they all work with a printer or hard drive). The USB input on the XDA-2 is a bit picky, and sometimes it simply doesn't work well with certain ports or cables; a ferrite bead does alter the transmission characteristics of the cable enough that it sometimes makes a difference.

I can tell you DEFINITELY that you shouldn't even consider "fancy cables". I would definitely recommend that you use a good quality commercial cable (like Amazon Basics or Cables-to-Go), and some really old or cheesy cables may cause problems (avoid really old cables rated USB 1.1 and NOT USB 2.0), but you won't see any improvement from anything more expensive or "fancier" that that. In fact , some expensive "audiophile USB cables" fail to meet even basic USB data specs, and will cause problems.

May 21, 2014 11:19:06 GMT -5 bene said:

This is a useful thread. The USB problems between my mac and my XDA-2 are annoying. I don't really know whether my mac or my XDA-2 is to blame. Now, one thing that occurred to me this morning is that the USB cable I'm using does not have a ferrite core whereas almost all the other DACs I've used come with a USB cable that has a ferrite core. Could this be an issue? Should I look to replace the cable I'm using with a cable with a ferrite core? Or maybe I should look into an even higher quality cable?

The problems I am having:
* My mac will read the XDA-2's capabilities as 41.1 and 48 kHz (fairly random, but almost always happens after the computer's gone to sleep)
• Audio program will hang when changing between music with different bitrates (say, from 44.1 to 192)or won't play high bitrate music - the fix is to switch USB socket.
• No audio. Sometimes the mac "thinks" it's communicating with the XDA-2 -- music appears to be playing -- but the XDA-2 does not "think" it's receiving any information (bitrate doesn't show up on display)

I should also mention that I use Audirvana Plus (1.5.12) as my media player.


(Please do not try to troubleshoot these issues here. My question is about USB cables. I don't want to divert from the thread's purpose.)

[KeithL]

Actually, I don't see any reason why that cable wouldn't work (it is USB 2.0). I've always liked ones that were gold plated, but I can't say that they actually work any better. The real problem is that there are some really old USB 1.1 printer cables still hanging around in drawers. I've used the Amazon Basics 2 meter cables, and never had problems, but they don't seem to have a one meter one that I could find. Ours do work well too

Jun 2, 2014 11:14:25 GMT -5 bene said:

Back again! So, I finally had a look at what cable I actually bought and maybe it's not a very good one. It's $2.50 now, but was around $5 when I bought it. Either way, I thought it was at least a bit more! Here's the cable: amzn.to/1iLPOSv
Since this may not be an ideal cable, I started looking for new ones, but I'm finding it difficult to locate a good quality cable that's less than 4ft long. I decided I'd stop by here and ask for recommendations. I may just get this over and done with and order one from Emotiva. At least then I won't constantly wonder about the quality!

[pdc33]

I've had fun with ALAC files but biggest collection is AAC and so 44.1 is my main format.  I've got a "personal listening post" for headphone listening in one room that's usually quiet in the house but the furniture configuration means it'd be truly nice to have the DAC/headphone amp on an end-table that's away from easy wiring to the Apple Airport Express and its optical out.  I've experimented with linking my iPhone to my XDA-1 via a powered USB hub and (after changing to a shorter/better cable) it works.  But the XDA is too big for the end-table.

Sooo, I'm eyeing the Stealth DC-1.  (OK, maybe I DO come up with "reasons" to buy new cool stuff. Do I really have to apologize in THIS forum?)  But the USB-B input would again require a powered hub as intermediary...UNLESS one of you have found a less-clunky way to do it?

So that's my issue:  any suggestions for the "least clunky" way to connect ( iPhone + lightning cable ) -> Stealth DC-1 ?