Playback from speakers is horribly distorted and clipped, but I haven’t changed any settings that I can tell from when it worked fine. The speakers work in phono via Sonos Port and BT input and hardwired via usb to an iPad and they are fine. Output from a usb hardwired Grace SDAC to a THX AAA 789 and Focal Clear is normal. I seem to have narrowed in on there being some issue with volume leveling and headroom management, as changing those from defaults immediately causes distortion.
No, I’ve seen clipping in the past and am familiar with the indicator turning red to show that. There’s no clipping showing either with headroom management on or off. Any increase in headroom management makes no difference at all. At zero it is fine, at -1 it suddenly becomes horrible. Maxing it out makes no difference.
I’m not sure about the 24 bit being the issue. Its true that those are bad no matter what but why would that make a difference to the 16 bit files not working with any DSP applied?
Ive restarted all devices. I’ve removed and re-added the speakers. Nothing seems to make a difference.
I’m open to any and all ideas. I managed to stumble onto settings that worked for me, but I’m definitely an amateur with all this.
If you look at the signal path, the signal is converted to 24-bit before being sent to the output when DSP is used. That’s why I suspected it, since I don’t see any other differences that could cause the issue.
Just for fun, I power cycled the speakers again to no avail. Tried 24 bit on the Focal with the SDAC and it sounded fine with all the DSP on. So far then the problems are with the speakers playing 16 bit with DSP on or 24 bit period.
I gotcha, I did actually see that it gets converted back and forth earlier, though I didn’t know whether that had some effect. Based on that thought, any ideas on how to make 24 bit not get screwed up?
Most probably it’s an issue with the speakers. I’m not familiar with Mac audio stack but I doubt it doesn’t handle 24 bits correctly. I used to have these speakers, and if I remember correctly, 24/96 was working fine through Chromecast audio and optical. I’m not 100% sure though, as the vast majority of my music is 16/44, and you’re using USB.
Sigh. Well what you said got me thinking and I tried the one thing I hadn’t tried yet, which was plugging the USB A cable into an Apple USB A to USB C adapter and plugging it into the back, which is a lightning port. Now everything works fine. It doesn’t explain why the SDAC is fine on USB A in either port. Oh well…
Interesting find. Perhaps the USB A ports in general just have issues depending on the implementation. There was a power aspect to that thread that was interesting to me, since the Klipsch don’t require power yet the Grace SDAC does.
