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Progress Report on exaSound e38 DAC - I'm a happy camper now

Posted by Chris from Lafayette on July 5, 2017 at 17:50:54:
I'd like to thank George, the support person at exaSound for helping me to work through all the initial problems I had with certain aspects of playback with the exaSound e38 multichannel DAC when I first got it about a month and a half ago. I was no doubt somewhat hot-headed in my initial whiney post about what has turned out to be a very wonderful upgrade to my system. I'd also like to thank everyone here who had suggestions as to how to proceed with some of the initial problems I encountered - I really appreciate it. As George said, setting up a multi-channel system adds a layer of complexity to a normal set-up, and, when something doesn't work as expected, a lot more possible culprits have to be checked out! ;-)

So. . . just an update on a couple of the original problems I had in the set up:
The hum in my system turned out NOT to be the fault of the exaSound unit. It was only a slight hum in any case, but it's present even when the exaSound unit is turned off. I believe I can do more experimentation to eliminate it completely.
The switching between the Macintosh Core Audio and the ASIO drivers now works flawlessly. I have no idea why it didn't work reliably the first couple of days.
Regarding the files downloaded from the Chandos site (where the wrong sound was going into the wrong channels), Chandos, like BIS (eClassical) is one of those very customer friendly sites which allows for re-download of files which you may have mangled in some way (as I did with my Chandos files). I've now re-downloaded all the original FLAC files and they all play wonderfully!
The stuttering on some multi-channel files I encountered when I had HQ Player set to upsample at high sample rates (e.g., 24/352.8) was eliminated (except on one title now!). I have also downloaded and played back DXD files (24/352.8) and quad DSD files with no problems. (And these downloads sound incredible to me - I've already posted about them over on the Music Forum here.) The "secret" (at least for me) of mitigating the stuttering was to play around with the filter settings on HQ Player, and when I changed it from "poly-sinc" to "poly-sinc-shrt" that proved decisive in eliminating the previous problems. (I'm not sure this will mean much to you if you've never used HQ Player). I had never encountered the stuttering problem before because I had never tried to upsample beyond 192K. The HQ Player filter settings are something that I can of course still play around with.
Despite the problems I originally had with HQ Player, I've found myself using it almost exclusively in the past few weeks (along with the ASIO driver), although Audirvana (used with Core Audio - it does not support ASIO - at least as of this time) continues to sound excellent. So it was a bit of a rocky road, but I feel that I've finally reached a new level of satisfaction with my system, now that the exaSound e38 is part of it!