White noise occurs when using DSP/sample rate conversion

[Masahiro_Watanabe]

Roon Core Machine

INTEL Core i3-8109U M.2 SSD
Roon rock

Networking Gear & Setup Details

Ethernet, no VPN

Connected Audio Devices

Sonore Ultrarendu, Chord Dave, Mcintosh MA8900

Number of Tracks in Library

Around 12,000 tracks

Description of Issue

White noise happen when using DSP/sample rate set as max PCM rate.
It occurs when track file change from non-MQA to MQA(Tidal) files, and also from MQA to non-MQA files.
When stop DSP, this issue not occur.

[Marin_Weigel (Bram Stoker's Cappuccino)]

Maybe setting resync delay fixes it…

[Traian_Boldea]

@Masahiro_Watanabe

Chord

If I remember I’ve seen talking about that. And maybe a solution

HQP and Chord Qutest

It’s a classic Chord DAC issue. If you haven’t had the issue with HQP Client yet, it’s only a matter of time, it will happen. It’s been reported with various Chord DACs for years, over on head-fi. It’s a USB interface issue. If you want high sample rates to feed Qutest, I think Audiowise SRC DX works trouble free (from what I’ve read by others)

Chord DACs: USB Vs. S/PDIF

Hi Martin I have a Qutest and have gone a little way down the rabbit hole on USB vs SPDIF. An important consideration for me is my preference for HQPlayer and upsampling to the maximum PCM rate of the Qutest 705k/768k. Using USB I was often the victim of brain frying white noise on occasion, normally when the base rate switched from 44.1k to 48k family. I noticed some discussions about a device that converts USB to dual BNC (SPDIF) namely the SRC-DX. The thread below on AS is one such and fol…

[Placebophile (Jeff)]

Chord user here.
Chord DACs don’t use off the shelf DAC chips.
ie: They do things differently.
Chord engineer/designer Rob Watts cautions against using 3rd party DSP and upsampling for his DACs (the switching noise you’re experiencing is a known consequence of this) and goes as far as to say they will sound better without such processing as they are already upsampling internally.
I’ve found this to be true

[Placebophile (Jeff)]

I forgot to include that using certain DSP with MQA is known to cause issues as well (on all DACs).
Have you tried disabling Roon’s MQA Core Decoder in the advanced tab of Device Settings?

[Traian_Boldea]

@Placebophile

Have you tried disabling Roon’s MQA Core Decoder in the advanced tab of Device Settings?

I think if you disable that you cannot do DSP anymore. If I remember right. Roon needs that so to unfold the mqa, does DSP, them encapsulates back to mqa for the MQA ready dac

[Placebophile (Jeff)]

Ah.
That makes sense.
I thought DSP broke the MQA chain in some way which might be why OP only had issues with DSP + MQA.

[Masahiro_Watanabe]

Thanks, but did try this before but didin`t solve issue.

[Masahiro_Watanabe]

Yes, seems same. Thanks for sharing

[Masahiro_Watanabe]

As you say, seems Chord DAVE issue. I will stop using upsampling.

[glc650]

Normally yes except Roon can re-add the MQA signalling after applying DSP but only if Roon is handling core decoding. I believe Roon is the only player that can do this.