Just gotten my Topping D90III Discrete, and to my misfortune I joined the group of folks that are facing clicking sounds using the DAC.
Clicking sound whenever the DAC isn't getting any audio signal and click whenever receiving signal, this means every 2 clicks every TV toggle sound.
Even during silence when the movie starts and the production house title animations are displayed, the silence between those segments will also cause clicks.
In between every change in music you get 2 clicks, I believe it is a faulty unit. My research across the forums shows a very clear divide of 2 groups of us, one enjoying the sound and the other complain about this problem.
Its really a pity because the soundstage, naturalness of sound, holographic are all real, but the click due to the voltage drops and peaks is driving me crazy.
It is confirmed a voltage issue as the click happens even at -99.0dB when the speaker is totally silent the click still happens whenever you have silence in tracks.
The crazier thing is that this is not my first time facing this problem, clicks are common when DACs change across formats/bitrates or when they are not "Always On" in the .xml configuration in the XMOS driver control panel settings.
This is extra saddening as I went into the script and made "Visible" the option to "Always On" which worked for my SMSL D6-S but nothing is working on the Topping D90III Discrete.
In the other DACs, they are just simply programmed to sleep during idle hence causing the click when the voltage drops, but for the Topping D90III Discrete, it is a worse problem than the above.
I tried RCA, XLR outputs. Bluetooth, Optical, USB inputs across 2 totally separate systems but the click still happens, this is 100% due to the DAC's voltage drops and peak that have gone faulty. And quite a high amount of failures at that according to the posts in the forums across the web.
Also tried high pass filters to no effects, again as it is due to a voltage issue when at -99.0dB hence this wouldn't fix it.
I've contacted a reseller and they told me that this is not a standard problem. Which further points me to the fact that this is a fault in the DAC.
The only other contrary post I read over here I think by Jeremy was that since this is a 1-bit DAC, the PCM has to be converted to DSD at every instance hence causing the DAC-Format-Switching that causes the click? (Though im not experienced enough to comprehend this).
I guess one of the solutions in a create a "constant sound" on your system when it is connected through USB so the DAC will not sleep. But I use it with its optical input setting from the WiiM so I cant generate a constant noise.
Also can i post a question to the folks enjoying this DAC, if you are actually experience the click, just that it is a full music listening set-up hence it is triggering lesser and you are fine with it? Or simply there isnt such thing as the clicking sound even happening in the first place.
Cant believe that I sank in 999usd to be working on all these debugging, Topping please step up.... the B200 is so awesome, but I guess a DAC has much more software, firmware controls that can go wrong.
It is the Lunar New Year now so I've got to wait till 4th February in order to receive contact from official topping channels.
Update #1: I bought a 2nd hand DDC just to test out all the other inputs/ouputs like COAXIAL, AES, I2S and all of it still persists with the problem. But a silver lining is that I've received information from Topping that they will be working on a firmware update after Lunar New Year.
