Now today I was testing again and stumbled on the problem - it’s in the hardware buffering and seems to be a firmware problem on the Concero. When set to “hardware default” in Media Center integer mode plays fine, but when set to “maximum” hardware buffer size, the DAC plays mostly silence with intermittent clicks and pops. The “maximum” setting works fine when integer mode is not selected.
Is there by any chance in behavior if you lower the buffer size?
As I informed issue mostly happen only 44.1 flac, wav and alac source from USB Storage, NAS and Tidal I haven’t got issue from HiRes or DSD I don’t think cause from buffer.
Ok after watching this video, I see this issue is different from your original post. “Ticking” noises at the beginning of playback are not the same the “jittery” sound in the video. The issue from the video, I believe, is caused when the input to the DAC changes from 16 to 24 bit. I can fairly reliably observe the same issue with a Concero and Roon and any other LINUX OS, for that matter. And I don’t think it’s a Roon specific issue, as I had the same problem with a Bryston BDP2 (LINUX based, uses its own music player software) feeding a Concero HD
In Roon, the fix should normally be to use DSP and set all frequencies to output the same (for argument, set all to 176.4khz). Sometimes Volume Leveling helps. But I do not know the root cause of this issue, so what works in one scenario may not work in another.
I put in a request for RLabs to look into this a couple of years ago and nothing came of it.
But in answer to the original post, I cannot replicate an ticks or pops at the beginning of track or during track change. But the jittery sound from the video is a well known (for RLabs customers/dealers) issue.
Glad to hear that up-sampling your content to DSD is a solution in the interim.
I spoke to the technical team and they confirmed that logs look as expected. We plan to reach out directly to Resonessence regarding this issue to see if they can advise further.
Also, upon speaking with the technical team we did a bit more research (specifically focusing on sample rates of 44kHz not working) and we were able to locate this article, perhaps this is related:
The Concero had some compatibility issues with my Auraliti PK90 music server connected over USB. It worked just fine playing 88.2kHz and 96kHz tracks. 44.1kHz and 48kHz files appeared to be playing but produced no sound at all, while 176.4kHz and 192kHz songs played with a terrible distortion. Mark Mallinson told me he’d look into it but it was likely an Auraliti issue rather than a Concero issue. The PK90 runs a version of MPD Linux but I don’t have another Linux box handy to test - Resonessence makes no claims about Linux compatibility, so this application was a stretch anyway. All of the other USB sources I tried were running Windows 7 and all worked flawlessly at every sample rate. So this should not be a problem for the majority of users
I have a Concero HD connected to a Roon Nucleus. I had a problem at first, but after re-generated the RAATServer on Roon, all music servers works fine as before. Now no issue with either 16 or 24 bits, including the MQA.
You can generate a new RAATServer instance on your device by following these instructions, but please be aware that this will reset your Roon Settings -> Audio Tab to factory settings and I would advise making a backup of any custom DSP settings you have:
Note, you will have to un-zip the ffmpeg archive twice, I would suggest using 7-zip to do so as other un-archiving programs have sometimes not extracted this file properly.
Then after unzipping, you need to place the ffmpeg file in the Codecs folder in your ROCK Database location and reboot ROCK, see screenshot below:
