Foobar, Super Pro 707 USB Dac, Asio noise/dropouts

[IamKirk]

I am experiencing some clicking noise when I switch songs sometimes in my foobar playlist. Occasonally I get dropouts on songs for a second. Asio was installed because kernal streaming was not supported. Asio fixed a lot of the noise when skipping songs. I assume because of the increased buffering settings, but the dropouts still seem to happen.

 

I use VNC viewer to select songs from a different computer so I thought maybe that was lagging the CPU. Turning it off did not fix this though. It doesn't even seem to be correlated to the CPU usage, as it never really gets over 40%. Pagefile is constant and never changes as well. Can anyone be of any help for this problem? It's bugging the hell out of me.

 

[The Computer Audiophile]

There are many variables in the equation. Can you test playing the same music with a different application? This way we can eliminate other things on your computer as the cause. If it's just foobar then we can zero in on the settings.

 

[BobH]

Along with Chris's suggestion you may also like to try switching the port the dac is plugged into.

 

Based on your set-up, I'm assuming you're running XP? I had a very similar sort of problem which manifested itself by my external usb hard-drive randomly losing its connection with the pc and re-starting itself, as though I had just plugged it in! The answer turned out to be as simple as plugging it into a different port! I have four such ports, in two pairs, on the side of my laptop and it transpires that two of them are shared with other system resources. However the system was handling the sharing routines caused the hard-drive to hiccup!

 

It transpires that the shared ports will be fine for things such as a mouse, printer, tea warmer etc, but not for time-critical items such as hard-drives! The other pair of ports are all on their own, with a dedicated controller, and will not be interrupted by the system going off to check on something else half-way through a song! This is quite common apparently, as it allows motherboard manufacturers to give you more ports than they would otherwise be able to do.

 

Anyway, whatever the reasons, once I'd plugged the external drive into one of the other pair - no more problem. Might be worth a try!

 

 

[The Computer Audiophile]

Great suggestion Bob. Here is an article I wrote about this very thing.

 

http://www.computeraudiophile.com/node/417

 

[IamKirk]

I had already tried plugging it into the front ports with the same hicups. I read that computer audiophile article when i did a search for drop outs. I haven't tried moving the external HD to the audio pc yet. Right now it is setup on my main cd and shared over the network. The only thing is, when I previously used my soundblaster external USB soundcard I didn't have any of these problems. I'm not 100% sure yet, but I think when i set output to normal through the USB without asio and stuff, it doesn't drop (haven't tested for extended periods though). Except the sound isn't as good and has more static and noise evident during some songs, and during the switching of songs in a playlist. I'm going to keep trying stuff and updating here, as people give more ideas.

 

[IamKirk]

I just watched the DAC and all of the lights for power and everything stay on during the blip. Nothing out of the ordinary occurs with those lights. It's all really strange. The computer has onboard sound on the motherboard, which I know isn't the best, but it was never a problem before. The computer has a gig of ram, 2.5 Ghz proc., etc. It's not like when the cpu goes off and it skips for multiple seconds. This is just a single drop out, then right back into the song.

 

[BobH]

........Followed by the sound of a slightly nervous titter...........

........Followed by the sound of scampering foot as Bob hopped off to have other foot surgically removed from mouth and to read all that stuff he hadn't got round to yet............

 

Titus Groaned.......

 

[IamKirk]

It appears Mediamonkey doesn't drop out at all. So what the hell is foobar doing. Is there any guide for buffer values and http buffer values and stuff like that? I have no idea what is causing these drop outs.

 

[IamKirk]

I just noticed that every time the music drops out a big Exclamation point appears on the asio4all icon in the tray. So it's messing up somehow for every drop.

 

[BobH]

I've had no need to try this myself but it looks as though it might be worth a go, and is well thought of on the asio4all forum. Lots of good background on the site : http://www.thesycon.com/deu/latency_check.shtml

 

You never know

 

[IamKirk]

Already used it. I read pretty much every thread on the asio4all, super pro usb and noise I could find on google lol.

 

I ended up just going back to the creative soundblaster external as the s/c, then output digi coax from that to the dac and it seems to clear everything up. So perhaps the onboard sound just sucks balls.

 

[IamKirk]

I am noticing a bit of noise with some of the Flacs I downloaded. Most noticably was a CSNY - Deja Vu flac. Perhaps it's just the recording? Are there any tests I can do to check bit perfect, or audio consistency with my media pc. I currently have a half decent comp I picked up used. Just onboard sound unfortunately. But I currently use a Creative External 24 soundcard. Relatively cheap. It goes from pc then to digi coax then to super pro usb dac. Rca out to receiver. The creative card seemed to be a better option to reduce the noise from just going usb to super pro usb dac. I would skip tracks and get a lot of noise. THe creative also allows KS but not asio.

 

[The Computer Audiophile]

Hi IamKirk - What's the source of the CSNY downloads?

 

[IamKirk]

. It was a Flac approved one though. Off a site that does a ton of flac downloading.

 

As per my initial question in this thread. I think I am going to lay the blame to the onboard sound through usb to the super pro dac. It works pretty well now through the creative. It's just a shame I don't have a better soundcard out from the computer

 

[Lucabeer]

Hi folks, I am new here...

 

I have the SuperPro 707 USB and I was experiencing the same problems. Changing USB ports didn't seem to help, nor did all the other suggestions I had found on the Net.

 

But yesterday night I made a nice discovery, and I wanted to share it with you. Here is a link to a Head-Fi post that I just wrote:

 

http://www.head-fi.org/forums/f46/useful-info-superpro-707-usb-dac-owners-maybe-other-usb-dacs-too-410599/

 

I still haven't tested thouroughly to see if the skipping problem is completely solved now (even before trying this solution, the glitch was very sporadical) but so far it sounds fine (using Foobar and Kernel Streaming)...

 

I hope it helps!

 

[IamKirk]

Awesome! I am currently using a creative external soundblaster fed into the 707 with a digi coax and it works fine with asio. How is the sound quality compared to what you had previously? This is an incredible find. I really appreciate the heads up.

 

[Lucabeer]

So far the sound quality seems identical to before... but (knocking on wood) WITHOUT the very brief and very occasional dropouts that plagued it before with the generic MS drivers. Of course I have listened to it for too short a time to say that the problem is completely eradicated, but so far so good.

 

Since you have chosen the S/PDIF path... well, it's not much an issue for you.

 

For me the coaxial digital connection was a big no-no because my crappy motherboard integrated sound card only outputs 48 or 96 Khz (instead of bitperfect 44.1) from the S/PDIF even when using ASIO or Kernel streaming, so I absolutely had to find a way to achieve stabler performance from USB.

 

[IamKirk]

As a bit of a follow up. I've been using the creative external 24 bit live soundcard to feed to the super pro. I recently stumbled upon...

 

http://www.head-fi.org/forums/f46/useful-info-superpro-707-usb-dac-owners-maybe-other-usb-dacs-too-410599/

 

This guy found a driver for the C-Media chip used in the dac that apparently can send the 44.1, use kernel streaming and everything. Would i be better using this straight to the computer via usb? Or stick with the creative ->usb->stereo. The creative likely has an awful SNR (Super Pro isn't great at 107db, but it's a cheap dac so it may well be better than the creative. I was just trying to simplify the path now that the Super PRO 707 dropout problem can be resolved with this driver (It also resolves the dac's lack of kernel streaming).

 

Thoughts from anyone that knows more than me? lol.