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Post by garrettwp on Dec 12, 2012 11:21:53 GMT -5
I am new to the forum and also a first time owner of Emotiva products. A year ago I was looking at the XDA-1 to use in my home office and with the limitations of the USB side of things and a few other issues, I went with a different product. A year goes by and I am now in a need of a DAC for my living room 2 channel setup. I came back looking at Emotiva products to see if anything new came out and what do you know, the XDA-2 was just released with everything that I was looking for.
I purchased the XDA-2 last week and received it on Monday (Really fast shipping from Emotiva!). I was excited to hook it up into my system and run it off my linux audio client (raspberry pi) to stream from my logitech media server. I got everything hooked up and then it all went down hill from there. Before I get into the issues, I wanted to say that the product itself is top notch. The quality of the unit is more than I was expecting. Now with my issues.
It appears that the XDA-2 is not fully compatible with linux. The alsa driver in linux has issues with the CM-6631 chip and this has been known for months now. I did not know this until the last few days. The problem happens when trying to switch between the different sample rates. The linux driver does not negotiate the proper sample rate with the XDA-2. So if you play a 16/44.1K track and than change to a 24/192K track, the XDA-2 will play it at 44.1K until you stop the track and replay it again. This has to be done with every track when changing sample rates. I also have issues with trying to get the XDA-2 to get the proper sample rate on the first play of a song when first powered up. I can never get it to play at the correct sample rate. When I do get the correct sample rate, say 44.1K the sound is not so great. There is almost some distortion and crackling in the tracks. This has put a bad taste in my month and I am pretty upset about the whole situation.
The last few days I have been spending time with the dac to try and make it work with linux, trying every possible setting in alsa, etc. I have had no luck getting it to sound right. I than decided to hook it up to my Mac Book Pro Retina and it played with out a hitch on both 16/44.1K tracks and 24/192K tracks. The same goes for on my other laptop running windows 8 using foobar. Since these other computers running mac os and windows is not my intended use with this dac, I come to the conclusion that I will have to contact Emotiva and send the unit back. The only solution to have 24/192K support in linux is to have a dac that uses the XMOS chip. Doing some research it looks like the alsa driver when developing support for USB Audio Class 2.0 was tested against the XMOS chipset. Many people have claimed that the XMOS chipset is working fine with linux.
I apologize for rambling in my post. I wanted to share with everyone my experience with trying to get the XDA-2 working under linux and report my findings with the usb chipset. Has anyone else experienced success or issues under linux? Am I the only one that has tested this under linux or having issues?
- Garrett
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Post by wizardofoz on Dec 12, 2012 13:08:06 GMT -5
Maybe not much use but the xda-1 works fine with linux...at least FC16 iirc
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Post by garrettwp on Dec 12, 2012 13:18:00 GMT -5
Maybe not much use but the xda-1 works fine with linux...at least FC16 iirc I believe this is because the output of the usb side is 24/48K and uses the USB Audio Class 1.0 which works very well under linux as it is driverless. Anyone have any thoughts before contacting Emotiva for a return. I really want to keep this unit. - Garrett |
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Post by dad311 on Dec 13, 2012 20:31:33 GMT -5
What version of Linux are you using?
Has anyone tried Fedora or Ubuntu with the XDA-2?
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Post by garbulky on Dec 13, 2012 21:08:30 GMT -5
garret: in case you didn't know the xda-2 had some firmware issues over USB causing problems with distortion and "screeching" noises. Only the first shipment was supposed to be affected and not the others but maybe yours was too? They have an update for the xda-2's firmware that may need shipping back. However there are very cheap USB to SPDIF converters (approx 30-40) out there that should work with Linux and not require any further changes or modifications to the xda-2 to make it work.
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Post by garrettwp on Dec 14, 2012 6:51:35 GMT -5
I wanted to post an update on my linux issue. It looks like it all comes down to being related to the raspberry pi for most of my issues. This does not solve the sample rate issue. Meaning when switching between different sample rates, linux and the dac can not negotiate the proper sample rate. So if you play a 16/44.1K track and then switch to 24/96K or 24/192K track, it will play at 44.1K. If you try to play a 44.1K track after playing the 24/192K track, it will play at 192K. This is related to the driver in linux as others are reporting this issue with the same usb chip in other dacs. The driver in linux for UAC 2.0 was writting based off of the XMOS chip. As this is has been known for months now and no update on the alsa drivers, not sure how long this will take to get solved. The only way to solve this issue is to stop and replay the track to correct the sample rate.
Now my distortion issues (popping and cracking during playback), I tested the XDA-2 on a spare laptop I had layout around. I loaded up the newest version of Linux Mint 14 and configured alsa and remove pulsaaudio. I can say that the XDA-2 does play fine at the given sample rate. So playing standard 16/44.1K content plays fine and sounds great. I did have to get the dac to negotiate the proper sample rate, but once set it works. I also was able to play the higher sample rate tracks with out issue. The sound output had no distortion that I can hear of and sounded much better than playing on the raspberry pi. So I believe that the raspberry pi has issues with higher bit rate dacs over usb. Many people on the Internet are complaining of usb issues with the pi. Using a dac that is limited to 16/48K and lower also plays fine on the raspberry pi.
I still need to do more test with the XDA-2 on my linux laptop, but I think I can say that it does play fine on linux with a few minor issues.
- Garrett
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Post by garbulky on Dec 14, 2012 8:58:15 GMT -5
Good to hear. Thanks Garrett. Welcome to the lounge!
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Post by garrettwp on Dec 15, 2012 8:33:18 GMT -5
Thanks for the welcome. I am hoping that the XDA-2 will be apart of the family. Still need to do more tests.
- Garrett
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Post by dad311 on Dec 15, 2012 8:55:01 GMT -5
Thanks for the update.
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Post by vincedog3 on Dec 15, 2012 10:19:50 GMT -5
I am thinking of getting back into Linux for fun. Glad to see everyone here using Linux.
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Post by gregd on Dec 19, 2012 11:07:44 GMT -5
Linux -- ARGH!!!! I got my XDA-2 last week. My plan was/is to use it as a pre-amp and a Linux box as a source (although I also have my satellite box and a blu ray player plugged in). I'm running Debian stable. Plan-A is to use the digital coax from the Linux box to the XDA-2. It just so happened I had a micro ATX motherboard with digital audio support sitting in an unused desktop. Did a fresh install of Linux (Debian), installed the proprietary drivers for the audio chipset. Without too much trouble I it was working great except that everything coming out at 48kHz. That WOULD have been fine, had I not seen someone mention HDTracks. Downloaded their sampler of higher rate files. I wondered if I could tell the difference. Uh-Oh, everything is coming out at 48kHz; will that make a difference? But this is Linux, right? I must love to fix things, because I still use it after all these years. Burned the latest Ubuntu release and ran from the DVD. Poking around with that didn't help much. I also plugged in the XDA-2's usb port (plan B). That didn't "just work" in either Debian or Ubuntu. The right driver seemed to load but it seemed to think that this was an audio source. After hours of reading I came to understand that these days ALSA is very helpful and by default lets all programs that want to send audio output and does a software mix of all the audio output streams, so you hear everything. Unfortunately this locks the sampling rate to 48kHz by default. Fussing with the config files for ALSA looked hard. It is pretty complicated and the documentation that I could find was not so comprehensible to me. I also went down the PulseAudio path. After installation I got nothing out to the XDA-2. It wanted to drive the analog outputs. This seemed like a step back, an additional layer of complexity. Got rid of Pulse Audio. So then I run into this link about mpd: blog.agdunn.net/?p=434True, another layer of complexity, but someone is using it to do exactly what I want. Turns out the default install of mpd will, after commenting out the one line that specifies a fixed sampling rate for output, will do exactly what I want! And of course, there is an Android client so I can use my phone as a remote. Linux - the fix is often simple, it's just the process of finding the simple fix is often long and complicated. Linux - WOOOO WHHOOOO!!! |
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Post by garbulky on Dec 19, 2012 11:18:05 GMT -5
Hi gregd. ;D Your struggles reminded me of my early computer days struggling to make hardware work on platforms that the hardware wasn't originally designed for. I'm thinking old windows 98 soundcards trying to run on windows xp drivers and losing all the advanced functionality. Struggling to get the wavetable to work on midi files. ;D I'm glad I haven't had to relive that in some time.
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Post by copperpipe on Dec 19, 2012 13:11:46 GMT -5
Yup, no 2 ways about it, linux and anything audio or video related, really ruins my day. Audio in linux is a horrific mess / mashup of alsa, pulse audio, gstreamer, phonon etc. Video in linux is jerky video playback with either propietary graphics drivers or open source "almost works" drivers... you can't even get a single screen resolution adjustment from Grub / Lilo to my desktop; screen is "constantly" flashing or adjusting the resolution throughout the boot process.
In short, you have to be either pretty nuts or dedicated to do anything audio / video in linux. The polish is just not there, and there are too many competing drivers or frameworks for any of it to become stable and 100% usable. Everytime I upgrade my linux OS I cross my fingers and hope not too many things break and that I'll have the patience to fix the mess that I know is coming.
But I do love linux (for many other reasons I won't get into here), I use it 100% of my working day as a java software developer. I've just learned to accept that audio / video is going to give me grief.
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Post by dad311 on Dec 19, 2012 13:41:07 GMT -5
Guess Im nuts! All my home PCs run some type of Linux.
AV wise, I have a Mythtv box that plays Audio and Video via HDMI perfectly and another that runs a DLNA server.
Takes a while to tweak it all, but I do prefer Linux over windows. Oh and the 100% FREE.
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Post by amt on Dec 19, 2012 15:57:52 GMT -5
Another MythTV user here. I have 4 off-air HDTV tuners and 2 HDPVR capture devices which are connected to DirecTV boxes, all connected to a back-end server. Then there are 3 front-ends which drive the displays. It was a major PITA to get working right, but there's nothing else I would want to use (I try to stay away from Windows). It is by no means plug and play.
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Post by greg121986 on Dec 19, 2012 18:03:29 GMT -5
To gregd, adgunn is a good friend of mine. If you would like to ask him any questions regarding MPD setup I'm sure I could forward them for you, or I may be able to get him to post here. CMedia chips typically do not get along with Linux. I have not seen many success stories with CMedia and any version of Linux. The XMOS chip is THE best USB transport chip that is currently available on the market. Its compatibility with Linux is also uncontested. However, its licensing costs can be a bit expensive, so you don't often see it in low cost products. It's really a shame. MPD is also the best source for bit perfect playback of your music. MPD is behind the majority of "media server" type system that are currently being sold for sometimes thousands of dollars. However, if you're not afraid of sitting behind a computer and doing some critical thinking, you can have the same system for very little to no cost.  I would love to get my hands on an XDA-2 and fiddle around with it on Linux and MPD. I'm sure I could get my buddy agdunn who is a Linux aficionado to help as well. |
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Post by GreenKiwi on Dec 19, 2012 19:53:10 GMT -5
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Post by garrettwp on Dec 20, 2012 1:10:39 GMT -5
Once you can get the XDA-2 to output the correct sample rate, it sounds great. However I have to keep fiddling with linux and the unit when I want to start playing music. Usually requires me to plug and unplug the unit from the usb port and start, stop, and start again the track to get it locked to the correct sample rate. As long as I stay at the same sample rate, I have no issues. I still have a few weeks to decide If I will stick with the XDA-2. I may pick up a cambridge dac magic that uses the xmos chip and try it out. If it were not for the CMedia chip, the XDA-2 would be a clear winner for price and performance.
- Garrett
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Post by garbulky on Dec 20, 2012 1:24:19 GMT -5
Does linux have compatibilities with USB to spdif converters? Some of them are very cheap.
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Post by garrettwp on Dec 20, 2012 1:30:31 GMT -5
Linux should have not issue with usb to spdif. This would depend on the usb chip used and most of the cheap spdif converters only support upto 48K sample rate. The more expensive ones support higher sample rates.
- Garrett
Update: Looks like the musiland monitor 01 is fairly cheap and outputs to 24/192 for around +/- 65 dollars depending where you buy it. I wonder how well it will work with linux. Would be a cheaper option to use instead of trying a different more expensive dac. (Well it looks like linux is out of the question for this unit, needs custom drivers which does not seem to be available for linux. Looks like the XMOS might be the way to go.)
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