Norman

Thank you, Ryan, for weighing in. I’ll contact you privately for the firmware update. Thank you for making this available!

Beautiful, clean board design. Nice Wima film caps and good Rubycon electrolytics. Just as clean and elegant as it gets.

Hello all. My temporary solution to the cycling issue was to remove the cover from the DAC. This prevents heat buildup, which seems to trigger the problem. In the case of my unit, it would work for a while when cool, but will eventually fail in the way that everyone is reporting, including the brief err message. Removing the cover may help until the firmware fix becomes broadly available.

Yep. I’m sure that they’ll put it online when it’s final. Glad to hear that the version you have has solved the problem.

Ha! I just saw desbiss’s post. Yes. I have the same cycling problem but haven’t received the firmware update. Running the DAC with the cover off is my temporary solution. I was expecting the firmware update to appear on the Support—>Firmware page of the Ayre web site, but it wasn’t there as of yesterday. Would love to get that update.

In response to CG, the sound quality is fantastic. Aural memory is far from perfect, but the upgraded version sounds super clean. Background noise is zero. Instruments and voices sound very natural. If pushed to specifics, I would say that the single most noticeable change is in the soundstaging. To my ears, the soundstage is larger in all dimensions: wider, taller, and deeper than before. For music that was actually recorded in a real space (in contrast to music constructed from parts recorded separately), the players are spread out further on the stage, allowing each one to be localized better in space. I particularly noticed an increase in image height. All said, I’m super-excited about the sound quality of the Twenty upgrade. I was told (in a phone conversation with Ayre) that Ayre is preparing a firmware update for the unit to address an issue whereby the DAC will cycle between standby and play under certain conditions. Perhaps Ryan can comment further. My system at the moment: Ayre QB-9 Twenty—>CAPS 3 computer with LPS and SOTm USB port—>Sonic Frontiers SFL-1 Signature preamp—>McIntosh MC2000 amp or homebrew PP 2A3 amp or homebrew SE 45 amp or homebrew SE 300B monoblocs or homebrew SE 211 monoblocs—>Avantgarde Duo 3.0

I asked the question because the Twenty upgrade did not work out of the box without identifying the problem and changing my system configuration. Hence, I was looking for confirmation that there had indeed been a change in the design. Others may have the same experience, so Ryan’s contribution here may help them as well. So true. It’s amazing that Ayre saw fit to provide an upgrade to a mature product. Very cool!

Hi Ryan. Thank you for the detailed explanation. Yeah. I can easily understand the dilemma. If there is no real difference between the two sources of power, and if you can eliminate the noise from the transformer laminations, eliminating the transformer makes perfect sense. I really appreciate the transparency in your explanation. Anyone who reads this will understand the decision.

Thank you for your thoughts on this. I tried your suggestions, and here are the results: Changing USB cables makes no difference. Switching the USB power off once the computer recognizes the DAC immediately switches the DAC from Play mode (display shows three horizontal blue bars) to Standby mode (display shows single green LED). Toggling USB power on and off while the Windows 10 Sound control panel is open both toggles the DAC between play and standby mode and toggles the computer between recognizing the DAC and not recognizing it. In other words, both the behavior of the DAC and the behavior of the computer indicate that the DAC needs USB power for the computer to recognize it (and to play music). Finally, when connecting the Ayre to any of the “ordinary” USB ports on the computer (not the fancy SOtM card, which allows USB power to be switched on and off), the computer recognizes the unit and everything works fine. That’s because the ordinary USB ports provide 5V to the DAC by default. The DAC gets the power it needs. So, all of my experiments (the ones you suggest and others) point in the same direction. It seems that the QB-9 Twenty upgrade now requires power from the USB port, whereas the DSD upgrade did not. I’d love to get confirmation of this and, if it’s true, would like to know why the folks at Ayre made the decision to again require power from the USB port.

I got my upgrade the other day. The first thing I noticed is that it didn’t work. The computer didn’t recognize the DAC. It worked fine the day I shipped it to Ayre for the upgrade, but didn’t work when I got it back. Why? What I (think) I discovered is that the Twenty upgrade seems to require USB power, which was not the case with the DSD upgrade. In order to make the Twenty upgrade work I had to switch my SOtM tX-USBexp card from USB power OFF to USB power ON (the red switch on the PCI card). If true, at least in theory, this is a step backward, as the DSD version did not require USB power. Has anyone else experienced the same thing? I’d like not to use USB power from the computer (or external linear power supply) if that is still possible.

Perfect timing, in that I just took delivery of my new QB-9 a few days ago. Folks may recall that the demo version I had borrowed from my local dealer would not work correctly with the SOtM USB 3.0 card. My ZUMA computer detected the Ayre correctly and the Ayre played (using JRiver), but whenever I tried to stop what was playing and play something else (or did similar very ordinary things, such as pausing play, etc.) the JRiver software would hang. Ending the JRiver from Task Manager would work, but JRiver would then not restart since Windows thought that it was already running. I had to restart the ZUMA to get going again. Long story short is that the Ayre did not work correctly when attached to the SOtM card. Similarly, the demo QB-9 did not work with the "stock" USB 3.0 ports on the ZUMA either. This time, playback consisted of just chirpy snippets of music. The QB-9 demo worked perfectly, however, with the stock USB 2.0 ports. That's where the story stood until I took delivery of my own QB-9. But this time, the story is entirely different. So far, through three listening sessions, the QB-9 has worked perfectly through the SOtM USB 3.0 port. But there is a difference, and this is that I installed the Streamlength USB driver, version 1.26 software that is now available on the Ayre web site. Ayre in just the past couple of weeks has added a setup section for Windows 8 computers.(I think that the Streamlength driver on the Ayre site is simply a signed version of the Thesycon driver, but I'm not certain.) In any case, with the driver installed the QB-9 has worked perfectly. So, it can be done. If this helps any I'm using a stock ZUMA purchased from Small Green Computer and JRiver version 18.0.106. The SOtM drivers I'm using are the ones that were preinstalled by Small Green Computer. So, I'd not doing anything special there. I don't know why the Ayre isn't detected through the SOtM USB 3.0 port. The only thing that jumps out at me is that I installed the Streamlength driver described in the previous paragraph. I did that before doing anything else, so don't know what would have happend w/o that driver installed. Hope this helps.

Interesting. An update the tX-USBexp driver could very well be the solution. Unfortunately, it seems that the existing driver (the one that currently ships with the SOtM card) works with some DACs and under some conditions. I suppose that's to be expected. Also, in response to beetlemania: thank you for your suggestion to contact Ayre. When I get my DAC (I hope this weekend), I'll do some testing and then call them. If they don't know already, they, too, will be interested in getting to the bottom of the problem using the SOtM card in the Zuma. Thanks all.

Interesting. I guess my next step, once I take delivery on my Ayre, is to go ahead and install the Thesycon driver and see if that makes a difference. I don't think it should, as I think the SOtM card should just work out of the box as a 2.0 USB interface whether or not the Thesycon driver is installed. The Thesycon, as I understand it, is for implementing Class 2 audio, but it shouldn't be needed for garden variety 44.1 KHz sampling rates. (Of course, I could be surprised.) Since it will take a week before my Ayre shows up at my house, I won't be able to report back until then. I'll continue to follow this thread for insights, however. Thank you!

Hi Chris. Thanks for responding. I used WASAPI - Event Style as the output mode. But, I did not install the Thesycon driver, as Ayre's web site recommends to do so only when planning to use sample rates > 96 KHz. Since the only sources I have at the moment are ripped CD's, I didn't attempt the higher-res config. With 64-bit Win8, installing the Thesycon is a bit of a challenge, so I left that step for later, once I actually take delivery of the Ayre and have more time to mess with it. In any case, it seemed from Ayre's guidance on the web that the Thesycon driver wasn't necessary at this point. There is also an italicized clause on the Ayre site stating that the Thesycon driver is incompatible with USB 3.0, but this statement is in their Windows 7 instructions, and seems to be related to the fact that Win 7 does not have native USB 3.0 drivers. Since Windows 8 does have such drivers, there' some ambiguity there regarding whether the Thesycon drivers will work in Win 8 with the Ayre. Ayre's web site does quite explicitly say that the DAC does not comply with the USB 3.0 standard, but it also seems to imply that the unit can be used with a USB 3.0 interface, but that it would be limited to Class 1 audio at 96KHz. My assumption was that the USB 3.0 interface would function as a 2.0 interface with the Ayre, w/o the Thesycon. Maybe that's an erroneous assumption. Unfortunately, I can't test any further until my Ayre arrives from the factory. But, I'm hoping to have a game plan for when it arrives. I sure want to use the SOtM tX-USBexp card when all is said and done.

Just signed on to Computeraudiophile. Fantastic resource. Thank you, Chris, for everything you do here. I have a new CAPS v3 Zuma, purchased from Small Green Computer. Love the design. Today I spent the day auditioning an Ayre QB-9 DAC for purchase and found that it worked perfectly when connected to the Zuma's USB 2.0 ports, but failed when connected to the USB 3.0 ports. When using the 3.0 ports connected to the motherboard, the DAC tried to play but the speakers only emitted an occasional snippet of badly distorted sound, rather than music. When using the SOtM tX-USBexp USB 3.0 port, I could get the DAC to play--but not reliably. It would play a song or two and then stop, causing JRiver to hang. Or, if I stopped play and then attempted to play a different track, JRiver would appear to be playing music (the elapsed time indicator continued to move, as if music was playing), but no sound came out. When I tried to do anything at that point, JRiver would hang. If I then forced JRiver to close, it wouldn't reopen, the error message stating that JRiver was already running. In practice, the only option was to wrest control of the computer away from the Ayre and to reboot. The bottom line is that I would like to use the Ayre (when I get it) with the SOtM tX-USBexp card, but it doesn't seem to work correctly. In earlier posts, you mention that every DAC you've tested worked perfectly with the SOtM tX-USBexp. Did you or any of your readers try it with the Ayre QB-9? Any ideas? Thank you!