Just got my RoPieee setup going and noticed an issue that I’m not sure originates with RoPieee (Raspberry Pi 4B) or the built-in DAC within my Rotel RA-1572.
If there isn’t an active audio stream through Roon, Spotify, or Airplay, my DAC defaults to DSD 768 and outputs static with some interference/noise. This always happen before starting to play music and after music has been stopped for some time. I don’t have any DAC-related options in my amplifier except to change the USB mode (1.0 vs. 2.0) and have looked into settings in Roon and RoPieee and nothing stood out as an obvious way to prevent this.
Has anyone else run into this issue and are there any ways to fix it? I don’t have any DSD content so disabling this would be OK, but I’m guessing my DAC is interpreting non-audio signals as high data rate DSD.
I beleive it has something to do when Ropieee/Raspberry drops the syncsignal and the remaning “input” to your DAC is among others shield noise from the USB cable and if you have a non-metal, or metal but non-earth connected cabinett? The RPi has for long been sensitive to rfi. Shield noise is since recording era started a very acknowledged problem. Today the manufacturers are getting sloppy and do not implement old school truths from studio experience, never solder the sheet metal port housing of a computer interface, whether it is USB or RJ45, to printed circuit board ground. They should be conncted as pin 1 in XLR to the chassis. Works in computer invironment, but introduced in audio circuits this ground noise is harmful to circuits around the DAC chip/s.
I just found your post. I am having this exact issue connecting a Nucleus to a Rotel RC-1572 preamp/DAC. I am wondering if you ever found a solution. If so, I would be most interested. Thanks, Tim
I believe setting the USB mode to 1.0 solved the DSD static issue since DSD isn’t supported (if I recall correctly). Since this post I bought a Topping external DAC that I’ve used to bypass the Rotel DAC and it works great.
I have some suspicions about how well grounded the Rotel is and that it might be more susceptible to ground noise. Haven’t spent much time looking into it but have has noise coming through on the phono stage and with a balanced XLR source.