tdf

In case it hasn't already been mentioned, I decided to try this on my Oppo BDP-103 and after initially being unsuccessful I realized that before the Oppo would recognize the USB drive with the AutoScript folder, I first needed to remove from the Oppo the USB drive with the BDP-103 jailbreak firmware (for playing BD ISOs). Now ripping away, PS3 will be retired, and all is sweet!

I'm still getting loud pops between DSD tracks here and it also seems like the first fraction of a second of at least the first track (on DSD) is skipped. The pops seems more or less random, or at least I haven't discerned a pattern yet. I'd guess they occur every 5 tracks or so. Setting the album to gapless in iTunes and Pure Music doesn't alleviate this as I had earlier speculated it would. My unit confirms it is on firmware 1.6 and I'm using Pure Music 1.86 on a late 2011 MacBook Pro with 8 gigs of ram. DSD flag is set in Pure Music as in most recent Mytek instructions. I use the firewire connection. Does anyone else experience this?

Is anyone else experiencing these pops? To be clear, they have been occurring in DSD playlists of single albums. I'm guessing that if I made every album gapless, the pops would stop, but assuming this is so it's not an ideal workaround.

I still enjoy the sound qualities of the Mytek very much but I occasionally still get loud pops between DSD tracks (.dff files) even with the latest firmware and using Pure Music 1.86 with DSD flag set as instructed.

Ted, do I understand you correctly that pops and other sounds between DSD tracks and on switching from DSD to PCM tracks are gone with the beta of fw 1.38? I'm still sitting on 1.34 for the moment. Also, if I upgrade and want to revert, would the revert menu option take me back to 1.34 or some earlier baseline version? Thanks. Steve

Good news. Thanks, Ted!

I've been spending all my time getting my Pure Music/iTunes library organized. I probably have several weeks left. So, I haven't been listening in the meantime. With respect to burn in, I don't want to leave my tube amp on all day while I'm at work, but if I just set up a day-long playlist in iTunes and hook headphones up to the Mytek, does that count as burn in, or does it have to be connected to an amp that's powered on for burn in to be happening?

For anyone with a lot of SACD ripping ahead of them, I've found that the speed of a USB flash drive can make a huge difference in the time it takes to rip a disc. First, I thought maybe one of my PS3's was just better but speed was all determined by flash speed. I can recommend this Sony drive as being much faster than these Kingston drives.

Ted, when you say the pops in between tracks is a remnant of the extractor, are you referring to sacd-extract or Mytek firmware? I'm hoping Mytek firmware so as to avoid re-extracting/tagging all my isos. Steve

Hi Harald. That wold make sense. I know I had problems just trying to backup extracted dff files from one hard drive to another because the file names, always for Classical, were too long. I had to rename them. So, maybe if I moved the sacd-extract program to the root directory, the path would be short enough that these would extract. I should try that. Steve

I just posted about this tagging problem in the Mytek thread. So, tagging dff files first with foobar then importing into Pure Music still results in improper track sequence and "Pure Music DSD bookmark" as the album title for every single album? If so, thanks, you just saved me a lot of time that I would have wasted tagging in foobar. Does tagging dsf in foobar then importing yield results any better, assuming foobar can tag dsf? Can it? The problem with tagging in iTunes after importing is untangling this rat's nest of mis-sequenced Classical tracks. I'd welcome any tips you've learned in the process. Ted, I spoke to the gentleman at Pure Music the other day and he said that it handles dff files somewhat more efficiently than dsf files. We weren't addressing tagging differences between the two formats when we spoke and I don't know whether this efficiency would have any bearing on sound quality but that's what I was told.

So far, I've ripped 4 isos that would not extract as dff (I didn't try dsf) with sacd-extract but would extract with scarletbook.exe. The discs are: Bach: Keyboard Concertos Vol. 2 Nos. 3, 5, 6, 7 Bach: Cembalo Concertos BWV 1052, 1053, 1054 & 1056 Bach: Brandenburg Concertos Nos. 1-4 BWV 1046-1049 Bach: Brandenburg Concertos Nos. 5 & 6 BWV 1050-1051, Triple Concerto BWV 1044 I'd be interested in whether anyone else has these discs to try this on.

My Mytek arrived on Tuesday with the 1.34 firmware. Out of the box, I enjoy it very much. It will replace my optical transport and I expect to never play another disc. I would echo previous comments as to the unit's neutrality. Quality recordings sound wonderful and lesser recordings sound lesser, as they should. I'm using Pure Music on a current model 13" Macbook Pro with Lion, 8 gigs of ram, and firewire to Mytek and USB to the external hard drive. I'm starting out with the Granite firewire cable that Ted suggested. Importing DSD tracks into Pure Music is slow. It took me close to two days for about 320 discs. I dropped the folder containing all my DSD files into the import window and that's how long it took. Flac is much faster to import. DSD tagging is an issue. What are people using for that? Foobar? I did no tagging prior to importing into Pure Music, other than that supplied by SACD ripper/extract, which seems to have been a mistake. After importing into Pure Music, every DSD album has as its title in iTunes "Pure Music DSD bookmark." And the tracks are not in their proper sequence. With a lot of Classical albums, unsorting these within iTunes and updating the iTunes tags would be arduous. I now plan to use Foobar or whatever other software people are using to tag DSD, to tag my DSD files, and then re-import them into Pure Music, first deleting the first-imported tracks. The other issues are firmware-related. DSD tracks seem to either fade in or cut off the very beginning of each track, or that may just occur on switching between DSD and flac files when a DSD file follows a flac file in a playlist. Also, there are often loud pops between files in DSD playlists. Hopefully, this will be fixed soon. But when the music is playing, the sound quality is everything I hoped for at the price.

That is music to my ears! All is well. If I plan to use Pure Music, should I be extracting to dsf instead of dff?

Mytek's product announcement .pdf at http://mytekdigital.com/download_library/stereo192-dsd-dac_new_product_release_july_2011.pdf shows the internals at page 6.