Hi @Donald_Glover ----- Thank you touching base with me and providing the results of your testing, both are very appreciated!
Moving forward, I would very much like to try and isolate, as Mike mentioned, where this bottle neck is potentially occurring. In your follow up to me you mentioned the following:
“There are no dropouts when playing music from a PC obtaining data from the Core MacBook Pro, so it is unlikely to be a problem with accessing the music from the disk drive. Only when playing music from the Ayre DAC using the USB connection is there a problem. Nothing else has changed except the Roon version.”
Can you verify the following, have you tried…
-
Using another USB device mounted to the MBP or another USB port on that device?
-
While this may seem elementary, have you tried swapping in a new USB cable?
-
You mention that the playback from a PC has no issues across your network, have you tried mounting the Ayre C5XE-MP via USB to that device?
-
Playing back through the internal speakers of the MacBook Pro?
As Mike mentioned we understand that these types of situations can indeed be frustrating and we acknowledge that this process of elimination can prove to be tedious at times, but it is the most reliable way for us to identify the variable(s) that are causing the issue to occur.
A few months ago we had a user with a VERY high end audio configuration who was experiencing dropouts, and just like your situation, they appeared to pop up out of the blue one day. After much back and forth it was determined that a failing drive in their NAS was the cause of the problem.
The point being is that we will continue to work with you until you see the end of these dropouts but we need to start eliminating some variables to determine what is causing the behavior.
Looking forward to your feedback!
-Eric