This has been a 3 month saga so forgive me for forgetting many details. Also I am not a digital music expert, analog being my preference (but digital is getting there).
System: 7 yr old Dell Dimension; Pentium 4 3.2 GHZ; 4 GB RAM; MC18
Music Fidelity XA-1 for preamp; Parasound A23 amp; Rega 3; Vanderteen 2ci's and Magnepan 1.7's; AudioQuest Evergreen interconnects; AQ cables' HRT Music Streamer II; Harmon Kardon HD 710 CD player
Chapter 1: Received Music Streamer II and experienced all the problems with tics, pops, and muting others have reported using kernel streaming. Purchased USB powered hub and Belkin Gold Pro USB cable and obtained significant improvement with MC buffering set to .20 sec. However, the same problems continued to sporadically occur. It seemed to be dependent on the resolution of the digital media (sample rates primarily.) Some files played better with MC buffering on .13 sec, some on .23 sec, etc... With very high resolution files .13 sec eliminated all audible tics and pops but the sound was weirdly distorted. Most reliable was .19 sec. During it all I was provided about half decent listening and half unacceptable, but nothing excellent.
Chapter 2: Downloaded and tried ASIO4ALL. Took a lot of experimenting with both MC and ASIO4ALL settings to get any sound at all. Finally obtained sound with Channel Offset = 8, but lots of tics and pops. Finally eliminated almost all of the ticks and pops playing with the ASIO4ALL settings, but for every song MC would always tell me that my device didn't support the format and would change DSP to 48 kHz sampling and 16 bit.
Well, I finally got everything to the point that MC and/or ASIO4ALL began crashing. I uninstalled ASIO4ALL and reinstalled. No sound again. Finally obtained sound with Channel Offset set back to 0. Great gains were than made by eventually setting MC buffering set to 1.0!!! But still some hiccuping on some files, again seemed to be related to the resolution. After much fine tuning I have ASIO4ALL settings as Latency In and Out = 192 samples. Kernel Buffers = 2 (false success for a while with it set to 4.) Always resample = On (I believe that switch has been reversed/corrected in the new Beta.) ASIO Buffer Size = 2048 samples.
It has been a fun journey. I'm 59 yrs old with a BS in Electrical Engineering and am for the first time loving digital music!!!! Enjoy the journey. It's almost as good as the destination!!!
HOPE this helps someone
Author
Topic: My long (finally successful!) journey w/ HRT Music Streamer II (Read 7339 times)