McIntosh d1100 "fade-in" problem

[MonstaChuck]

On 8/31/2018 at 12:47 PM, joey_corleone said:

 

Yeah, you won’t find it in the manual, as the feature was added for 1.03 after I worked directly with McIntosh on this problem. If you contact McIntosh or your dealer, you should have no problem getting setup with 1.03

Just to confirm, this will eliminate the forced muting of the initial tracks? That’s awesome. I run roon from Mac and even with the same bitrate I get jostled by the stop and start. 

[MonstaChuck]

I also have a K-03x which is what I use most of the time. From my MacBook I use Roon via USB to the K-03x, and I use an XLR / AES cable from the esoteric to the D1100 digitally for comparisons sake. There’s a positive here I’ll explain in the next paragraph. I forget what other settings I changed, but for either the hiccups occur I think when you change the bitrate and the USB “handshake” is invoked. Both the esoteric and the d1100 have issues here. If I remember correctly even when switching albums with the same bitrate the d1100 needed to be quickly reintroduced with my Mac and there’s the fade in. With the esoteric it only happens with changing bitrates and I get that subtle click click     click. 

 

By doing it it this way, my esoteric holds on to the bitrate and sends that digital bitrate signal to the d1100 via the aes / xlr cable until the bitrate changes, no fade in or static between tracks.

 

Kind of related is a separate roon esoteric bitrate mac rant. If I play 96khz or 192khz tracks on the esoteric it freezes when I try to play 88khz or 44.1khz tracks right after. It’s bizarre. If I use audirvana no issues. If I use jriver on a pc no issues. To get around this I have roon play 96khz tracks as 88khz and 192khz as 176khz. It’s a quirk, and I’ll eventually get a barebones pc or the roon Nucleus for a smoother experience. 

[MonstaChuck]

Yeah it does... A lot of the software out there can convert DSD on the fly to 192/24 or 96/24 etc I'm not sure if I had it on random between DSD and DSD as 192 if I'd really notice. If I'm really, really anal I might say DSD is a little smoother but I don't remember the last time I really focused on that. I have maybe 20 DSD albums, and whatever improvement there may have been it wasn't enough to make me go buy a bunch of new DSD albums. Instead I stream a lot of Tidal and Qobuz hi-res now so DSD use isn't really a factor. Getting the K-03x with DSD specifically was more fear of missing out. If I remember right the K-03 without DSD can also act as a preamp while the K-03x does not. Grand scheme of things that may be a cooler long term feature for a second room if the esoteric ever gets replaced in your system.

 

For my time my OCD ness is better spent A/Bing the Esoteric to the D1100 with different interconnects and speaker cables. It's probably 80% Esoteric / 20% D1100.