There’s one more thing… Most external USB-DACs with built-in headphone amp do not have a physical volume control, for example AK-HC2, they rely on manufacturer app to control the hardware volume control in the USB-DAC. USB Audio Player PRO has built-in hardware volume control, so there’s no re-sampling occurred. If ARC added in this hardware volume control, it will be complete!
Warning! Don’t plug-in USB-DAC with built-in headphone amp without using manufacturer volume app, doing this will subject to maximum volume!!!
This is great - but there is a problem (at least with the cheap DACs), as there is no ability to control the volume through the app. It plays at maximum volume.
Unfortunately volume control is not good yet. My ears still hurts after trying the new USB driver with very sensitive iems. Cheap DACs, yeah right, sorry competitor apps handle that easily. On top the bug with cracking noise coming out of the phone speaker is still there in build 92 of arc. I know the driver has beta label but it should come with a warning as well.
Thank you Thanks for ARC team for doing this and thank you for pointing out the update. Never opened tidal app since Arc came out but now I can uninstall it for good.
But the Douk Audio U2 (usb to spdif bridge) stays silent. This has always worked on android usb audio before, also no problem when arc uses android usb audio (resample to 48) , but no go for ARC with bit perfect engaged.
Though when connecting I get the necessary prompts, the Douk stays silent.
I hope an update will fix.
For people having hardware volume control issues, it would be very helpful if you could share the exact model of your DAC. E.g. “AudioQuest Dragonfly Black v1.2”, not just “Dragonfly”.
We have hardware volume controls working on well over a dozen DACs that we have tested with in-house. If you are having problems, it’s likely that there is some quirk of a certain DAC chipset that we aren’t accommodating somehow. Knowing the impacted products will help us narrow this down, or acquire one for testing/development.
We labeled the driver beta because it’s really impossible to address every last corner case until people have used it with thousands of different products. While we have a lot of hardware in-house, and have purchased quite a bit more for this project, we don’t have every single DAC that you guys do, and we never will. So we really appreciate people trying it out and helping find the gaps.
Volume control does not work correctly with Dragonfly Cobalt.
The Focal Bathys in DAC mode (USB connected to phone) volume control does not work. Max volume always. Let me know if there’s any helpful debug info I can provide.
Hardware volume control doesn’t work with the Meizu Hifi Pro dac from my Samsung S20 (Android 12).
Volume control with the Meizu Pro works fine from the USB Audio Player Pro app (which has Hi-res playback for Android).
There will be issues with lots of different dacs along the the way, this is to be expected given Androids variants and DAC hardware being differrent. I UAP has been doing this for years and has to constantly update to add support for new ones and quirks to firmware and OS updates that breaks support. I don’t envy Roon in this endeavour it’s a whole new can of support worms to deal with.
@Tobes
IAPP Hires driver is for sound playback to phone speaker or headphone 3,5mm jack. Not for using the usb as an audio output. For bitperfect over usb it’s another driver it uses.
Seems many phone sound chips (to speaker/headphone jack) can do highres but android won’t use this potential. The uapp hires driver will use that potential. If I’m understanding things correctly.
I may have another issue now.
Since trying the ARC usb audio beta, the Roon app on my S20 phone now has very low volume with the Meizu Pro. This worked fine before.
Have to work that out.
