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In Reply to: Re: Clicks and pops, I finally found a solution for Foobar playback in Windows posted by Jim F. on December 26, 2006 at 09:04:05:
And even stranger, my used laptop is a fairly old and plain jane Dell with a 1.6GHZ processor and only 512 MB of RAM. And yet I was able to get rid of the clicks. I wonder if the DAC you are or were using was part of the problem.
Follow Ups:
> I wonder if the DAC you are or were using was part of the problem.DACs don't often do that sort of thing unless they're outright
defective, or unless you've got a **really** bad S/PDIF
connection (a very low bandwidth cable, or a badly-shielded
coax cable, or an intermittent cable), or unless there's some
sort of electrical interference, or a really unfortunate electrical
interaction between components. That sort of thing used to be
reported in the high-end mags with some frequency back in the early
days of digital audio separates -- in the late 80's,
early 90's, but I haven't heard of it recently.With the first separate DAC I owned, back in 1990 or so,
I used an ordinary audio cable as an S/PDIF interconnect
and the sound would drop out every time the refrigerator
came on. But that was a long time ago (and even the
S/PDIF receiver chip in that unit, a Yamaha device,
was primitive by today's standards).I'm not using a USB DAC, but an internal sound card
with S/PDIF or ADAT optical output. As far as sound cards go,
I'm using the same ones -- X-Fi, E-MU 1212M, that I was using with
the old PC. (I also have an M-Audio Audiophile Firewire outboard
sound card, but I had other problems with that, and I stopped using
it quite a while ago.) I am aware that people have blamed
similar problems on the drivers for these cards (particularly
in the case of the X-Fi), but again, I'm using the same
sound card drivers as I was with the old PC.The DAC itself has been, when I've been listening most closely for
these glitches, a second E-MU 1212M in another (slower, but in
this case we're talking about processing entirely within the
sound card, at least when monitoring only and not recording via
WaveLab) PC, connected to the playback PC via ADAT optical
over a 50' premium-quality Hosa Toslink cable.
That second E-MU sends balanced (1/4" TRS) analog out
to a Behringer Powerplay Pro-XL HA-4700 headphone amp, in
turn connected to a Cambridge SoundWorks MicroWorks
satellite/subwoofer PC speaker system. I was using that
arrangement primarily to re-record WAVs ripped from CDs via
EAC to DVD-Audio discs using various outboard processing
devices (Audio Alchemy DTI Pro32, Perpetual Tech P-1A), or
Windows Media Player decoding HDCDs, or even the X-Fi's
"24-bit Crystalizer", together with offline SRC upsampling to 24/192.
But I finally despaired of getting a clean dub from one PC to
the other because of these "hiccups", which would be painfully
obviously when listening to the finished DVD-A, and would practically
chain me to the PC when dubbing in order to listen for a glitch
that would require redoing a track. It would take a week to get a
clean DVD-A out of a single CD's worth of tracks! Not worth the
time. I only ever made a dozen of these DVD-As in a year's time.
I was also using the DVD-A authoring as a means of getting
familiar with WaveLab, PatchMix, etc. in preparation for using
these tools, together with an Apogee Rosetta 200 A/D converter,
to digitize a bunch of LPs using a fancy turntable I bought on
the used market at the end of last year. That project has been on
hold because of the uncertainties surrounding getting reliable audio
out of the PC (would WaveLab make glitchy WAVs from the Rosetta A/D?)But I've been listening using this same equipment with the
new PC, and I haven't heard anything amiss so far.
Hope it's not just wishful thinking!When a DAC loses sync with S/PDIF input, the sound usually
ceases for a substantial fraction of a second.
The "hiccups" I was getting were of very short duration,
and sometimes sounded as if a minute fraction of the audio
were being **repeated**, a kind of bounce effect. The glitches
were was similar to those from a 1997-model DVD player I once
owned that would play CDs, but would insert almost subliminal
"skips" into the audio -- not dropouts (where the sound goes
away briefly but noticeably), but literally portions
of the audio cleanly excised, as if it had suddenly and seamlessly
jumped ahead one or two tracks. My problems were not actually
clicks and pops (I **was** getting clicks with the M-Audio
Audiophile Firewire, which is why I stopped using it -- I could
actually see those clicks in WaveLab as extremely short-duration
dropouts where the signal would drop straight to zero and
then shoot back up again -- a vertical slice out of the waveform).There are many variables here, I know. But I had already
strongly suspected that the problem was on the PC playback
side rather than the recording/monitoring end, or anything
in between. Time will tell, I guess! I've gotten sensitized
to these glitches, though, so if one occurs, I'll jump.
Thanks for all the info about DACs. I often wondered if that was where my problem lay, but of course since I solved it another way that kind of blows that theory. I have been using USB DACs. First a Scott Nixon USB Tube DAC "usb-direct-I2S" - non-oversampled - tube buffered external DAC, and more recently a Monica DAC with a USB-Spdif card installed in the DAC. Since I am only using this system for playback, I like having a fairly simple system.Good luck with your new system, it sounds like it is pretty immune to both the weird skips you were getting and more garden variety clicks or dropouts.
Here's another detailed site on the subject:
http://www.pcmus.com/clicknpops.htmInteresting that this guy does **not** recommend
AMD/nForce 2 to be used for Digital Audio Workstations.
Apparently Windows XP SP1 (which is what I installed
when I **bought** my nForce 2 motherboard 3 years ago)
had a bug which created excessive CPU overhead on disk
transfers with this motherboard. XP SP2 has supposedly
fixed the problem. I didn't upgrade
to SP2 until this past summer. OTOH, I certainly had
already installed the latest nVidia chipset drivers
from late 2003 that also supposedly fixed the problem.
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