Hi Bill,
There's actually a couple issues happening simultaneously, both regarding high-rate and not solely DSD, but the issue appears more often with DSD files. One, we have direct control of, as it has to do the fact we wanted to offer HDCD compatibility...Charley was always a big fan of that format over SACDs, but found that some discs tend to not be as good as others with the encoding. As a result, we had to loosen up the code and the pops are from the QX-5 entering and exiting HDCD mode when it's picking up false indicators...this can happen in PCM tracks since we had to loosen what it's looking for. The fix for this is to completely gut and redo the code, unfortunately, as it's pretty intrinsic in everything, but we are planning on releasing a patch to temporarily shut off HDCD until we have it resolved, which is a pretty easy fix and should be out soon now that we're in the new place. That's the reference in the former patch notes. We really hate the idea of turning off features, which has been part of the delay, as we were hoping to be able to change a few variables to address the problem...but it's simply not the case and has left us with little other choice.
The second is less obvious and impacts only one or two people. As far as we can tell, it seems to be related to packet losses on the Ethernet input, but it's a really tricky problem to replicate for us and the problem is happening in the module that we (and a few other companies) use for the Ethernet input. Once the new firmware is out, give it a try and see if the problems go away for you and please let me know! I'm hoping that we'll have it out sometime next week.
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