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[bring23it]

Hello just got my Chord Qutest in and am absolutely in love with it however my JRiver Media Center is popping in between tracks when playing any dsd or dsd upsampled tracks. I upgraded from media center 21 to 24 thinking this may be the issue as when I bought 21 the Chord Qutest was not on the market and possibly not fully supported in JRiver. Upgrading resulted in nothing more though then me spending $30 as the popping still exists in every track change.

My popping issues go away when not playing dsd. This also only happens in JRiver with dsd playback as my phones Onyko HF player's dsd playback exhibited none of the popping issues. Also my chord mojo does not exhibit this popping issue within J River with the same exact playback settings.

Current playback settings.
Digital Output (Chord Async) [WASAPI] > Chord Qutest > 4xDSD in DoP format (Output Encoding)

Thanks for your taking time out of your day to assist me.

[Spike1000]

This could well be the Chord Qutest* hardware. Some DACs do 'pop' when switching 'modes', eg switching between sample rates. This may explain why it doesn't happen between FLAC files and your other DACs don't exhibit the same behaviour. Try playing a series of DSD tracks with the same sample rate (and no upsampling) and see where that takes you. You can then try upsampling one or mixing in some different rates and see what happens.

Spike

* Qutest? Really? Dreadful  name 

[bring23it]

This could well be the Chord Qutest* hardware. Some DACs do 'pop' when switching 'modes', eg switching between sample rates. This may explain why it doesn't happen between FLAC files and your other DACs don't exhibit the same behaviour. Try playing a series of DSD tracks with the same sample rate (and no upsampling) and see where that takes you. You can then try upsampling one or mixing in some different rates and see what happens.

Spike

* Qutest? Really? Dreadful  name 

I would think it was on the DAC side too but when playing DSD files through other platforms such as Onyko's HF Player I am not receiving the popping effect at all. Which leads me to believe its something happening in JRiver. I attempting to use the play silence at startup for hadware sync feature and that didn't help. Also I added a gapped track change and removed gapless playback in all forms yet the pops still only happen in JRiver. It's quite the oddity.

Subnote: Qutest really is a terrible name but what an amazing sound it has! LoL Terrible name...Great Sound! Should be the slogan here.

[blgentry]

Current playback settings.
Digital Output (Chord Async) [WASAPI] > Chord Qutest > 4xDSD in DoP format (Output Encoding)

This output encoding setting is probably not what you want.  Presumably you want to play DSD content as DSD and PCM content as PCM.  That output encoding setting will do two things:

1.  Convert all PCM to 4xDSD
2.  Convert all DSD below 4x to PCM, then convert that PCM to 4xDSD

So most of your content will be artificially encoded to DSD and your real DSD will be "broken" by converting to PCM first and then back to DSD.

What you probably want to do is use the bitstreaming options to bitstream all DSD, then turn output encoding OFF.  That way PCM will go to your DAC as PCM and DSD will go to your DAC as DSD.  Which is probably what you want and is probably what will yield the best sound quality.

...and might also stop your popping problems to boot.

Brian.

[dtc]

Do you have the same popping with 1x and 2x DSD?


Have you tried the Chord ASIO driver? That is what I use on my Hugo. I assume there is one for the Qutest.  Since QUTEST does 8xDSD, I assume it supports native DSD sample rates (not DoP). You need an ASIO driver for that. WASAPI only supports DoP, not native sample rates.

Agree with Brian - turn on Output Encoding and send PCM as PCM and DSD as DSD.

[bring23it]

This output encoding setting is probably not what you want.  Presumably you want to play DSD content as DSD and PCM content as PCM.  That output encoding setting will do two things:

1.  Convert all PCM to 4xDSD
2.  Convert all DSD below 4x to PCM, then convert that PCM to 4xDSD

So most of your content will be artificially encoded to DSD and your real DSD will be "broken" by converting to PCM first and then back to DSD.

What you probably want to do is use the bitstreaming options to bitstream all DSD, then turn output encoding OFF.  That way PCM will go to your DAC as PCM and DSD will go to your DAC as DSD.  Which is probably what you want and is probably what will yield the best sound quality.

...and might also stop your popping problems to boot.

Brian.

This situation would work but I find upconverting to dsd from pcm to be quite pleasing and more revealing to my ears. So I do want to upconvert. I may revert to this solution for a bit though as I am terrified the popping may cause some damage to my focal utopias. I appreciate the response Brian!

[bring23it]

Do you have the same popping with 1x and 2x DSD?


Have you tried the Chord ASIO driver? That is what I use on my Hugo. I assume there is one for the Qutest.  Since QUTEST does 8xDSD, I assume it supports native DSD sample rates (not DoP). You need an ASIO driver for that. WASAPI only supports DoP, not native sample rates.

Agree with Brian - turn on Output Encoding and send PCM as PCM and DSD as DSD.

Switching to 1x or 2x exhibits no popping... Very interesting. I am on wasapi. I did switch to ASIO drivers and attempted a native upscaling to 8x however the sound lags and says its not pushing enough pushing enough bits to output the input directly. I assume that is simply a hardware limitation on my computer?

I appreciate your help. I do see that my HF player is only capable of a (2x) 5.6 upconvert in DSD to DoP format as well so possibly the problem is with the 4x only.

[bring23it]

I painstakingly put foobar2000 (Wasn't fun) together to get a similiar dsd output path and it seems to pop as well when pushing past dsd 256.... Possibly just the way the chord qutest handles itself.

Appreciate everybody taking the time to help me out. I am going to reach out to chord for a comment but may just have to accept the hardware quirk or get some higher quality recordings to stop artificially up-sampling.

[dtc]

Sounds like it may be a cpu issue when upscaling to 4x and 8x.  You might get a 4x and 8x native DSD file of the net and see if they play directly, no upscaling. My guess is that they will, and the problem is with your CPU capacity.  You can check you CPU usage when upscaling,  but that does not always tell the whole story.

You can get free 4x DSD from NativeDSD. I will have to remember where I got my 8xDSD free sample.

Here is another good source of test files up to 4xDSD.

http://www.2l.no/hires/index.html

[bring23it]

Alright so I seem to have eliminated all popping by switching to ASIO over WASAPI and adding a 1000 milliseconds buffering delay. Adding the delay also allowed for smooth playback of the 8x native dsd converions. So I'm a very happy camper now.

Thanks for all your recommendations guys. Hopefully if anybody runs into this issue in the future they can see this post and quickly fix there issues.

[dtc]

Awesome!!! Enjoy the music. Love the Chord DACs. Dave will come home when I win the lottery.