That's a "feature". It happens when you switch formats. I had to sell mine because that click was so loud and awful, it made the tubes from my amp crackle. Very annoying and scary.
Supposedly, internally everything "becomes PCM", but I don't know at what sample rate. I don't know anything, so I'll keep quiet and wait for some adult to show up and answer.
If you're unlucky and get a bad DAC, it's just the headache of returning it and then waiting for the replacement.
It shouldn't cost you more.
In my experience, and reading reviews, it's like a 5% chance.
Just buy it as directly as you can from them. And if you have to contact them for whatever...
Well, you would end up with my problem, which is, what other DAC can I get for that price range? All the non-chinese start at like US$1000.
You could buy the recently released Topping D70.
I'm waiting for the vendor to respond with instructions, supposedly I have to send it back to them and then wait 3 weeks for my money back.
But it seems they don't like that it's not a failure you can "see".
So I'm taking it for a last redeeming spin.
Some questions:
If I upsample everything to DSD512, will I skip the SU-8 filters?
If not, which filter is better for classical music and a tube amp, with speakers that do 25Hz - 30kHz?
I'm giving the SU-8 another go, with the DSD512 upsampling and RCA outputs.
It's not a general issue, it just happened to me after 100 hours without problems. DSD64 had this awful "foreground white noise", and PCM sounded louder, with distortion. All these problems only on the XLR, so maybe it was related to something in that "path".
@zym1010 makes sense, since no software should jump that quickly in version numbers.
I got a cheap used cambridge dacmagic with XLR outputs today so I could discard 100% that there was a problem in the rest of my setup.
And I was right, it was just the SU-8.
@Feyire sadly the SU-8 is in its box right now waiting to be returned, so no more testing for me. Either way, the DSD64 noises appeared after a month (100 hours) of use, it wasn't out of the box. Luckily I should get some of my money back since it's been only 1.5 months.
I won't miss that awful...
@Bookingyo keep the button pressed before and during turning it on. It will factory reset and briefly show its firmware version.
For a clean test, I used a bootable usb with "wtfplay" and a DSD64 file. That way I discarded windows, drivers, software, etc.
I tried with a HifiBerry with XLR outputs, and didn't get the saturation/noises, but it doesn't do DSD.
I'm also getting a used DAC on saturday to definitively rule out the XLR input on my amp.
But even if it was the XLR input, why would it sound differently between DSD64 and DSD512? The amp...
Well, if I re-encode it to DSD512, the hiss disappears and it sounds normal.
So my theory stands that this thing is decoding one or two levels above what I'm sending to it.
I catched it displaying "DSD256" after playing DSD64, but I couldn't replicate it. And I've never played that format...