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[madbrain]

I got a new WiiM Pro Plus yesterday. It doesn't support DSD natively, unfortunately.
I enabled on-the-fly DSD to PCM transcoding in the DLNA options of my Media server, and set it to output 24 bits/192 kHz. I set it to transcode only DSF, DFF and SACD files.
Everything was playing fine for a while until at one point when playback was switching to the next track automatically, I heard extremely loud white noise out of my speakers, that scared me and my cats. This happened twice.
I switched the on-the-fly transcoding to 24/96kHz, but the issue happened again, not immediately, but after a few tracks.
It's really quite scary when this happens because of how loud it is - possibly enough to blow the speakers if left long enough. I haven't been able to play an entire SACD album with on-the-fly transcode without running into the white noise issue.

My next test was to pre-transcode at the file level, ie. not on the fly. First, I transcoded the SACD to 352.8 kHz FLAC files. The Wiim Pro Plus device accepted those files directly, and the entire album played without white noise. There were some clicks/pops/gaps at the end of each track, though.

Next I pre-transcoded the SACD to 176.4 kHz FLAC files. These played seamlessly from MC31 onto the WiiM without any issue - no white noise, no gaps, clicks, pops - everything as expected.

I don't know why it would make a difference if the DSD->PCM transcode is done on the fly vs on disk, but it clearly does when using the WiiM.

I'd prefer to use the on-the-fly transcoding, so I don't have duplicate versions of the same album in my collection (DSD & PCM). The originals are SACD ISO. But the white noise issue needs to get resolved in order to do that.

I'm testing the on-the-fly transcoding right now against my Marantz SR7011 receiver, streaming from MC31 over the network and transcoding on the fly to 24/176.4k. I'm not sure what protocol is used by MC to talk to it - it may not be the same as with the WiiM. But so far, there is no white noise, though it's only played 4 tracks. I'm going to let an entire SACD play through and report back in this post .

Edit: I didn't experience any white noise with the Marantz.  The transcoding worked marvelously,  without any audible artifacts. So,  this issue is specific to using WiiM.