Quote:
Originally Posted by gtl
Hi Ryan. I am now at version J. I did receive an email reply from Gary Mulder. He mentioned this “As far as the pops with DSD 128 files. That’s a known glitch with the QX-5 Twenty that we are working on. My apologies for this. Hope to have a fix before too long!”
Likewise, on Ayre Qx5 firmware page, “When playing specific high rate files, the QX-5 briefly indicates that HDCD codes are detected and begins decoding. This causes audible changes in track level.”
I am not sure if the issue I am facing is related to this.
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Hi gtl,
As far as the HDCD issue you mentioned, this is unrelated to your problem. We disabled HDCD detection completely at the moment and that's a side effect with HDCD tracks only. When we wanted to implement HDCD decoding, in the purist nature that we tend to follow, we created a way for the QX-5 to detect and display when an HDCD disc is properly encoded or when it just looks like an HDCD track to most players, but really isn't truly one. Charley was always particularly interested in revealing people who take advantage of our industry. So we created the system that will display HDCD in one of two ways to show the difference.
Unfortunately, it caused a few more problems than we anticipated. To be exact, it caused popping issues with high-rate files, particularly of the DSD format. Had we done an easy generic way of decoding the CD's, it would have worked perfectly...but Ayre doesn't do anything generic. We decided that the best thing to do was to disable the rarely-used HDCD decoding entirely while we sorted the problem out to ensure those listening to PCM and DSD files do not have to suffer drop-outs in their music. We know of a way to fix it now, but are in the testing process before re-enabling the feature for public use.
At any rate, I'm quite certain you shouldn't be experiencing issues if the firmware is correct and I'll want to have it fixed for you. I work directly with the engineers daily (one of them has to suffer sharing a wall with me, so I'm over in his office to ask him what's getting done all the time) and even spoke with our CTO about your issue yesterday to confirm you shouldn't be experiencing issues like that. If you still are with all the latest firmware, again, please let us know and I'll get you in touch with our engineers.