Audioquest Dragonfly Cobalt directly into ultraRendu
Number of Tracks in Library
10,000 tracks
Description of Issue
As I play music I get about 2 seconds of distortion each 2:10 or 3:40 (usually). The distortion only happens when I play music, and it sounds to me to be distortion of the music rather than noise superimposed onto the music. It happens both for playing music from the pre-installed internal hard drive and for internet radio. There is no noise if I pause the music.
The switch, LAN cables and audio cable are all new, and this is a new setup of the SonicTransporter/ulraRendu. The dragonfly cobalt DAC works fine with my iMac and headphones.
Can you tell anything from logsd, or do you have any suggestions? Thanks!
As it’s classical music, could it be happening when the music is at louder sections of the music. I’m thinking clipping is the issue.
One way to see this clipping is to enable headroom in the DSP settings for your endpoint, but set it to 0 and activate the ‘show clipping in the signal path’.
Menzies,
Thanks for looking at this. It’s definitely not clipping, as it also happens during quiet periods of the music, and it is very regular, favouring 2:10 and 3:40 between bursts of noise. I have an mp4 of the sound, but I can’t attach it.
My feeling is that it has to do with buffering of the data stream, but I don’t understand enough to take the next step.
In the device settings for the zone you can adjust the USB buffer to see if it helps. You should not have to with a Dragonfly they are pretty plug and play. Do you only get this when using Roon from the Rendu ?
I’ve connected the Cobalt directly to the SonicTransporter, and the noises are gone. I guess the ultraRendu is defective, and I’ll get it replaced.
Here is the signal path now:
