Topping D70s - Skipping / glitching during playback.

[mattiastomas]

Hi All,

For the past 5 months I’ve been running the D70s with a Gustard H16 being fed with a MacBook Pro using Tidal via USB. Been working perfectly.
Recently though for the past 2 weeks, pretty every song I play seems to skip/glitch. Some times few times throughout the song. And sometimes the song would play as if in slow mo or sped up (yet the time counter seems to be the same).
At first I thought my usb cable was going bad, so I replaced it but same issue.
Then I thought it was a Tidal issue, so I cleared the cache, reset it, deleted and reinstalled and made sure I had latest update. Same issue.
Then I switch out the Dac to two others dacs (schiit Modi and audioquest dragonfly cobalt) but kept the rest of the audio chain the same and I did not once have the issue of skip/glitch during any song!
This leads me to believe it’s an issue with the D70s itself.
Anyone come across something like this and found a solution?
I emailed Topping but have yet to get a response.
Oh and one other thing I noticed was that everything the skip/glitch happens the sample rate changes on the D70s screen (so it jumps from say 44 to 48 or 96 etc).
Any help would be much appreciated.

 

[phofman]

Very interesting. It looks as if some master clock generator circuit is receiving some bogus signals to switch between samplerates, while the display MCU reads these signals too and displays the current values. That could produce USB sound being played slower/faster (with glitches due to buffer under/overruns), without the USB host interrupting the stream, with the actual playback samplerate being displayed on the screen. Theoretically if the current frequency was communicated in binary form via 4 GPIO outputs (10 samplerates in total?) and one or more solder joints failed over time on this "bus", it could produce these random samplerate flips.

IMHO the device needs a repair.

 

[mattiastomas]

Very interesting. It looks as if some master clock generator circuit is receiving some bogus signals to switch between samplerates, while the display MCU reads these signals too and displays the current values. That could produce USB sound being played slower/faster (with glitches due to buffer under/overruns), without the USB host interrupting the stream, with the actual playback samplerate being displayed on the screen. Theoretically if the current frequency was communicated in binary form via 4 GPIO outputs (10 samplerates in total?) and one or more solder joints failed over time on this "bus", it could produce these random samplerate flips.

IMHO the device needs a repair.

Thanks for the info. Although I didn’t quite understand all of it. Am still waiting on a response from topping as if it does need repairs it should still be in warranty as it’s only 5 months old.

 

[Gorancho]

Thanks for the info. Although I didn’t quite understand all of it. Am still waiting on a response from topping as if it does need repairs it should still be in warranty as it’s only 5 months old.

Problem occurs when you play mqa files from tidal. Try to set hifi in tidal and see if problem is still there? Issue is with macbook pro i think when you play mqa files. You can set tidal app to do the first software decoding and than send files to topping.