mmdanziger

First of all, thanks for your response and your helpful posts in other threads. Following your advice, I installed the latest mpd 0.16 alpha something from the trunk ppa and told it to output to my device with hw:1,0 (no plug needed) and it appears to be working fine. I have one glaring problem and that is that 24 bit files are often afflicted with unending clicks. They sound almost like vinyl noise but more jarring more frequent and have more of a click sound than a pop sound. 16/44.1 files play fine and sometimes the 24/96 files play fine as well. I have not been able to establish criteria for when the clicks will appear and when not. Could these clicks be lost data from a bad usb cable? A re-sampling artifact? ??? I have not edited/created an asound.conf file yet. I have been wary to mess with alsa-wide settings as I have no idea what I'm doing there and don't want to impair the functioning of my on board ALC888 which I still want to use for web browsing, games and system notifications. Is this a common problem? Does it point to a particular "weakest link" or should I be doing more thorough testing? Thanks again, md.

Hi, I'm new to this site and I apologize in advance if I've misposted this question. I couldn't tell whether it belonged in the software or DAC section. Anyhow, I've recently acquired a Music Streamer II and am playing around with it on my Linux box (Linux Mint 9 KDE). I've never really tweaked my Linux audio settings so I must confess, I'm a bit confused about the whole pulse, alsa, oss, phonon business. I've selected the Music Streamer as my main sound card in System Settings and am getting sound out of it. The sound is a bit flat, but it's very sharp and very clean. I'm hooking it up to a Naim Nait 5i and Revel F12 loudspeakers. I think that's probably just the sound of the device, I bought it as a partial replacement for my Meridian 506 which is in need of major repairs. I guess for $150 you don't quite the same sound as a CD player which cost 20 or 30 times as much new. My question is what to do to get the very best sound out of my device. Lossless is a no brainer. But is there any difference, from a sonic perspective, between pulse and alsa...oss4? How does KDE/phonon affect that question? Using one player over another? Amarok clearly uses the phonon backend while mplayer is self-contained, right? The quality of the USB cable? My interconnects are fancy audiophile grade but the USB cable is just a generic Chinese factory piece. Sorry if I'm dumping a ton of unrelated or silly questions, I'm new to the computer audiophile game and the pages I found discussing the differences between the systems were confusing and largely avoided the question of sound quality. If anyone knows something about this sort of setup, I'd appreciate it.