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MDAC First Listen (part 00100100)

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misterdog said:
My father was at Stalingrad, words cannot ever come anything near to that horror that 'man-kind' created.
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Ouch! I lost my grandfather to a Russian radio mine, but at least my country managed to (mostly) keep their ground against Stalin - and growing up in the Cold War era, I always looked at the countries on the other side of the Iron Curtain, thinking about how close it was that we didn't end up on that side of it too.
 
Space is the Place said:
Thats great John as i'm currently Dacless! due the Dac i have now developing a fault, im itching to buy another Dac with volume control to keep me going, but im already down for a salvaged MDAC so hopefully i can sit it out until the MDAC2 arrives!
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After all the DAC's you have owned you are DAC less?

For sure I can repair your current DAC with no problem - or have you already paid for a salvaged unit? if so I get it going for you as a temporary solution.
 
Rune said:
Guess that I will not be able to sneak four of them inside the house unnoticed by the decoration police :D
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Its as shame we cannot live without our "decoration police" :p

Each Amplifier is a monoblock so this effectively doubles the heatsink area :)
 
JohnW said:
After all the DAC's you have owned you are DAC less?

For sure I can repair your current DAC with no problem - or have you already paid for a salvaged unit? if so I get it going for you as a temporary solution.
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John thank you very much for the kind offer but its not a MDAC thats gone wrong! Yes I've already paid for a salvaged unit, i don't currently own an MDAC (although i have had three of them! none of them have ever been faulty).

Just carry on with your work, i'll just soldier on with using the valve preamp as the volume control for now, i'm reluctant to buy another dac (as this system works better without the Valve amp in the chain) as i thought the original MDAC was getting close to being perfect, im sure the newly designed board will take things to another level.
 
Quick question (probably in the manual) but how much ventilation gap does the M-DAC require at the top. Assume a really hot day etc. Getting a custom shelf made up soon.
 
Space is the Place said:
John thank you very much for the kind offer but its not a MDAC thats gone wrong! Yes I've already paid for a salvaged unit, i don't currently own an MDAC (although i have had three of them! none of them have ever been faulty).

Just carry on with your work, i'll just soldier on with using the valve preamp as the volume control for now, i'm reluctant to buy another dac (as this system works better without the Valve amp in the chain) as i thought the original MDAC was getting close to being perfect, im sure the newly designed board will take things to another level.
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Yes, no problem - I can repair any brand DAC for you... they are all the same.

Let me know, otherwise I can ship you a "repaired" salvaged unit as we are still atleast 4 months away before shipping on the first units.
 
JohnW said:
Yes, no problem - I can repair any brand DAC for you... they are all the same.

Let me know, otherwise I can ship you a "repaired" salvaged unit as we are still atleast 4 months away before shipping on the first units.
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That'd be great John if you could ship me a repaired unit! Then I'd ship it back when your ready it save me buying another Dac in the mean time!
If you can PM with the shipping costs etc, i can paypal you the money, be really interesting to hear the MDAC with the new speaker setup, again many thanks! :)
 
Space is the Place said:
That'd be great John if you could ship me a repaired unit! Then I'd ship it back when your ready it save me buying another Dac in the mean time!
If you can PM with the shipping costs etc, i can paypal you the money, be really interesting to hear the MDAC with the new speaker setup, again many thanks! :)
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Lets do that then, I'll grab a savaged unit and use it on the bench for a week to try and catch any random problems.
 
Iirc some people have had crackling problems when using USB with MDAC. Yesterday I upgraded my trusty PC with new motherboard (msi x99s xpower ac) and cpu (5820k). Everything went quite smoothly apart from one thing. M-dac started to complain about these "buffering problems" (newer quite saw what it says) and there was random crackling and loud pops from both channels and a few times the playback just stopped after a short a scream ("screek").

My OS is windows 8.1 and i did not any such problems with my ivy bridge mobo.

Anyways, after several hours of googling and trying all kinds of "fixes" that did not fix the problem, i think i have a solution: http://www.techsupportalert.com/content/how-fix-annoying-windows-usb-problem.htm

Apparently the power saving feature on USB can make the streaming through USB lazy and sometimes miss the timing. I hope this helps also some other fighting the same problem. Give it a try.

ps. And btw, i tried streaming to mdac with a USB-spdif interface (Hiface) and the problem manifested itself with constant cracking (no loud pops tho). The USB-spdif just probably uses shorter buffers/frames and it sounds a bit different.

ps2. seems like it didn't help in all the cases, damn it :/. Vlc crackles like hell.
 
LarsS said:
Elviz,
this application has helped me identify and pinpoint source of audio problems exactly as you describe them
- - > http://www.resplendence.com/latencymon
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I tried that too and got it to tell me that i have a problem with USB audio. However i haven't yet figured out how to benefit from that information. There are columns of information, but i guess i need to put more time studying that information. Last time i had to do this kind of things, there was like 3 DMAs and 15 IRQs. This stuff is much more confusing.

Btw, i got audio working (knock know), with toslink cable from integrated realtek audio interface.
 
@ ELVIZ have you tried playing direct from memory, using JRiver for example ?

Or JPlay which is supposed to optimise PC playback.

Maybe stating the obvious, have you disabled Microsoft sounds, and set MDAC as the default Audio output.

I use Win 8.1 with JRiver MC19 'direct from memory' output through a USB 3 port and this works fine.
 
The problem is something i haven't encountered before. It feels like there is extreme amounts of jitter in the data streaming. It can be ok for a few minutes, but then something starts oscillating resulting in miss timed data frames. It looks like that if the USB buffer is visible on the MDAC screen too. First the buffer is saying at 49-50% then it suddenly goes to 0%, back to 50% and everything between.

JRiver was just fine 24 hours ago, before i upgraded my PC but not after. I can't be something trivial causing this, however i wish it was. I am suspecting that either i need to re-install windows 8.1 or there is something incompatible with usb audio in msi x99s xpower mobo or the chipset/drivers or in worst case the mobo is faulty. I got no UI sounds enabled and yes the MDAC was the default output and the settings were good too.
 
Elviz said:
The problem is something i haven't encountered before. It feels like there is extreme amounts of jitter in the data streaming. It can be ok for a few minutes, but then something starts oscillating resulting in miss timed data frames. It looks like that if the USB buffer is visible on the MDAC screen too. First the buffer is saying at 49-50% then it suddenly goes to 0%, back to 50% and everything between.

JRiver was just fine 24 hours ago, before i upgraded my PC but not after. I can't be something trivial causing this, however i wish it was. I am suspecting that either i need to re-install windows 8.1 or there is something incompatible with usb audio in msi x99s xpower mobo or the chipset/drivers or in worst case the mobo is faulty. I got no UI sounds enabled and yes the MDAC was the default output and the settings were good too.
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Are you still using your old windows installation?
 
Hi John,
Hopefully a quick question. Would it be possible to have the USB driver for MDAC2 designed/configured so that when a AV encoded stream (e.g. DOLBY DIGITAL, etc) is send to it, it would just pass it as is to MDAC2 and MDAC2 would then just pass it through to the digital output without any processing?

I am thinking of a computer based system where music (stereo and multi channel) and video audio are sent to MDAC2 and in case of a AV encoded stream, the digital stream is sent to digital output on MDAC2 (no local processing) and maybe AV bypass is automatically enabled. An attached AV processor can then process the stream and send back the audio for Left and Right channel back to MDAC2 to go to amplifier.

I hope my description makes sense.

Thanks and I hope you are winning the battle with the Lab setup.
 
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