New Liberty DAC in the house!

Phil_Wright · October 12, 2018, 6:51pm

Art Dudley has reviewed the Liberty in the (very) latest Stereophile. He likes it.

Gerald_Sullivan · October 13, 2018, 1:24am

Is it available online?

Phil_Wright · October 13, 2018, 7:38am

Not yet. I suspect it will be sometime in the next month though

Gerald_Sullivan · October 13, 2018, 4:56pm

Thanks. I’ll watch for it!

Phil_Wright · October 13, 2018, 5:23pm

Gerald

It’s a nice read - Art does write well (as does Herb).

I have both a Liberty and Brooklyn+ in at the moment, with a comparative piece coming soon to go with the already published Liberty review (all at Darko Audio as per my tag). I’ve also got an SBooster supply to throw into the mix.

Rene - please delete this post if it’s a link too far. Given our discussion on the topic hopefully not

Phil

Gerald_Sullivan · October 13, 2018, 7:48pm

I’be read both of your reviews and enjoyed them both. It’s good to hear from you!

Phil_Wright1 · October 13, 2018, 8:03pm

Thank you.

Bill_Janssen · October 25, 2018, 9:53pm

The review is up.

Gerald_Sullivan · October 26, 2018, 12:12pm

Very good read!!!
Gerald

Chris_Kimmelshue · October 26, 2018, 12:25pm

Great review, but I cringe when I read about these curmudgeons talk about cars. They knock on any car they cannot afford. They need to stick to discussing audio.

Vincent_Kennedy · January 8, 2019, 8:48pm

@Chris_Kimmelshue - Over the recent holiday break I moved from a Dell 5510 feeding a Chord Mojo to an “approved” Intel NUC running ROCK feeding a Mytek Liberty. After the second or third day I began to experience rapid song skipping with no audio output. Initially I thought that the only way to regain control of that Zone was to reboot the ROCK. Today I tried turning the Liberty Off/On and that resolved the issue for now. I replaced the stock USB cable for an AudioQuest Cinnamon about a week ago with the hope that was the issue. Unfortunately it wasn’t.

I am running v1.31 firmware.

Have you encountered this issue?

Thanks in advance,
Vince

Bill_Janssen · January 8, 2019, 9:09pm

I’ve seen this too, with my Liberty. If you get a second or two of white noise before the skipping starts, Roon says it’s a design flaw in how Mytek interfaces with the XMOS chip they are using in the Liberty, and Roon has so far refused to do anything to mitigate it in the Roon software, though they admit they know how to do that.

Read https://community.roonlabs.com/t/dac-issues-with-xmos-usb-chipset-and-roon-on-linux for the whole sorry story.

Vincent_Kennedy · January 8, 2019, 9:45pm

Hi @Bill_Janssen - Well that was an eye opening read. I am pretty sure that I wouldn’t have picked an XMOS based DAC or maybe even passed entirely on Roon and gone in a different direction for a music server. I would imagine if this was common knowledge, many others would think twice about Roon.

I don’t understand why Roon is not posting this information in a broader fashion. To find this info buried in a support thread is a little disappointing. I’ve spent hours troubleshooting this issue and have an open issue with Roon support for the past two weeks. During this time, the XMOS issue hasn’t been raised once by Roon Support.

Bill_Janssen · January 8, 2019, 9:51pm

Maybe they don’t think it’s the issue? Could be something else.

I fixed this by changing the way I connected. I was using a Raspberry Pi connected via Ethernet, then USB to the Liberty. Instead, I used the WiFi on the Pi, and that seems to have changed the timing enough to eliminate the problem (for me). I can see that with direct connection to a ROCK device, that’s not an option for you. You could try running Windows on the NUC instead of ROCK, and see if that changes the timing enough.

Vincent_Kennedy · January 8, 2019, 10:08pm

I think my next course of action is to move my Sonore microRendu to be the interface to the Mytek. I’ll move the Rock over to my Sony TA- ZH1ES and see if the problem either moves or disappears. Good to know about this now, I was about to purchase an Allo USBridge for my office. I’ll hold off on that now. If the Sonore swap works, I’ll most likely pickup another one of those to use as an endpoint.

Thanks again,
Vince

John_Hill · January 8, 2019, 10:16pm

Got the Liberty, too. Really loving it so far.

Chris_Kimmelshue · January 8, 2019, 10:41pm

Every so often, Roon tends to do this to me no matter the endpoint (several AirPlay speakers, two USB DACs in my home). I’m not inclined to think it is just the Liberty doing this.

Bill_Janssen · January 8, 2019, 11:31pm

A lot of DACs these days use the XMOS chipset to handle USB and S/PDIF inputs. Quite possible all of your equipment has that chipset in it. I just ordered a new DAC with, guess what, the XMOS XU208 chipset handling the inputs.

Gerald_Sullivan · January 9, 2019, 12:33am

I’ve not had any problems with my Liberty. I have it plugged into a sTOM sMS-200. It would be nice if Mytek got around to making it a Roon ready device though🤪.

Vincent_Kennedy · January 9, 2019, 12:39am

@Gerald_Sullivan - Are you wanting the Mytek Liberty to be Roon Ready or the sMS-200? I see on their site the following:

“As to the player software, Roon Ready, MPD, DLNA, SqueezeLite and others are available. And the music files from an external USB storage device, network shared folders and streaming services are also available. As well, the more functions can be easily added via software upgrade.”

Thanks