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[SKY1950]

Hi Nathan,

I have been it touch with my dealer and he has spoken to ATC, they are sending a CDA MK 2 to the shop and I am going to take my laptop down which is set with the JRiver MC plus DSD 256 and Flac 192 files that stutter, this will at least indicate if it's the CDA or Laptop/JRiver MC problem, I will update this post as soon as I can.

Steve

[GuySmileysMonkey]

I guess another possibility is that there is a problem with the USB driver that ATC supply.

[GuySmileysMonkey]

Hi Steve.  Any progress on this yet?  I've just spoken with the importer who's been helping me. He's been very helpful but hasn't been able to reproduce the stuttering, concluding that there is nothing wrong with the DAC. This doesn't surprise me, but I'm still left with a DAC that isn't decoding hi-res files properly, whatever the cause. Very frustrating.

[JimH]

Did you try changing the Power settings on the laptop?

Using another machine in place of the laptop might give you additional clues.

I didn't re-read the thread, but did you try playing a file from the hard drive of the laptop? 

[SKY1950]

Hi GuySmileysMonkey,

Well took my laptop to my dealer, they connected it to an ATC SIA2 - 100 which they confirmed with ATC is the same DAC-Drivers_Electronics, anyway it started playing a DSD 256 file very well then the buffing started, so I tried a Flac 192k 24 Bit file and the same problem, we was not on internet these were files on the hard drive, anyway they phoned ATC and spoke to the technical guy, so he is going to come back to me next week, so no answers yet but at least it happened on another unit, I will update you when I get more info.

Steve

[SKY1950]

Hi JimH,
Tried changing mains, Files on the Hard Drive, Have not tried another lap top yet but did take my lap top to my hi fi dealer and we connected it to an ATC SIA2 which has the same internals as my CDA MK2 and it started buffing on that too so they contacted ATC and I'm waiting for them to come back to me.

Steve

[GuySmileysMonkey]

Turns out that the problem with playback was my power settings on battery power. Thought I'd changed this by selecting "high performance" in Windows settings, but my Acer Nitro laptop has proprietary software that over-rides this. Changed the settings from within this software and all good.... Plays back hi-res material without issue.

[SKY1950]

Hi GuySmileysMonkey

Hey, that's good news, I tried changing my Surface Laptop to full power on plugged in windows 10 but it made no difference, I don't know of any other settings in the Surface Laptop that may help ?

Steve

[SKY1950]

Hi,
Can anyone advise me if the setup recommended by ATC for the CDA2 should work to play DSD 256 music files on a Microsoft Surface Laptop, using this setup my DSD 256 files stutter, internet is very good and standard Flac files play with no problem, I have attached images from their manual, this is an old problem but any advice would be welcome.

Steve

[JimH]

Have you tried looking at Windows Task Manager?

How old is the Surface?  Try running a benchmark (under the Help Menu) and posting here.

Try a more powerful machine if you have one.

[SKY1950]

Hi,

Looked at the task manager while playing JRiver with a dsd file, I run a benchmark, the Surface is 2021 plus 1.20 ghz and i5 CPU, as I'm not sure what I should look for I've added some screenshots, my guess is it may not have enough power ?

[Awesome Donkey]

Looked at the task manager while playing JRiver with a dsd file, I run a benchmark, the Surface is 2021 plus 1.20 ghz and i5 CPU, as I'm not sure what I should look for I've added some screenshots, my guess is it may not have enough power ?

Are you using DSD bitstreaming or doing a DSD conversion? If the latter, then nope, probably not powerful enough. If the former, bitstreaming actually uses very little resources to do, as it sends the data as-is to your DAC to decode and not doing any sort of conversion.

A screenshot of MC's Audio Path while attempting playback of a DSD256 file might shed some light.

[SKY1950]

Hi, DSD Bitstreaming selected as recommended by ATC, two screenshots, 12 is an DSD 256 21 is a 192 Flac file these are the type of files that buffer, other standard files play fine with the same settings.

Steve

[JimH]

Looked at the task manager while playing JRiver with a dsd file, I run a benchmark, the Surface is 2021 plus 1.20 ghz and i5 CPU, as I'm not sure what I should look for I've added some screenshots, my guess is it may not have enough power ?

That's a fairly low power machine by today's standards.  Do you have another machine you can try?  Just to try to isolate where the problem is.