I recently bought a download file of Seam Shibe’s album Profesion. As it was offered in a “high res plus” format of 192 kHz 24 bit, I got that. (Normally the highest I go is 48 kHz, 24 bit.) I downloaded it to the Core. My Core is close enough to my main system that I can either stream over wifi or connect using a coax BNC to RCA cable. Normally both options work fine. However, in this case, I found that going from the Core to the Atom via cable, each track would hang up at some point. Some tracks went as far as 22 seconds, some barely got to 2, but the stopping place was very consistent. Streaming over wifi, using the Atom to find the album and play it, everything was fine. So the file was OK. I also tried a different DAC with identical results. I also tried re-downloading the file at a lower resolution, and found that both the coax and wifi worked fine.
Is there something I’m missing on the Core settings? Could it be that I simply have a sub-par cable?
There should be no problem playing 24/192 files over SPDIF, so a defective cable is a possibility. Certainly worth trying a different one to at least rule out the problem.
Given that both devices need a network connection, though, if they work reliably that way is there any point in using a direct connection?
It could be a sub par SPDIF cable, but typically that would show up as minor dropouts, not a complete stop of the playout, so I kind of doubt that is the issue… but worth swapping the cable just in case.
It sounds like to me there might be an issue with the Core rendering that 192/24 file, rather than the transport itself.
Assuming the 192/24 download file is FLAC try transcoding it to WAV and see if the core renders it ok then. You can then try re encoding as FLAC.
It might be some part of the FLAC or whatever codec is used, encoding is simply tripping up the Core file format rendering software (the part that extracts the digital audio data from the file encoding) when it creates the 192/24/2 SPDIF stream, and that the Core UPnP engine and the Atom rendering software is more robust perhaps.
Thanks. I will order good quality 75 Ohm cable and re-try. The reason for using the cable when wifi works fine was simply curiosity to see if any sound quality improvement was possible via cable as some have said. That was why I was using the high res file.
Well that turned out to be the answer! I converted a track to WAV then back to FLAC all at 192/24, and put both tracks on the Core. Both played with no problems. I just converted the rest of the album to WAV and downloaded that, and left things there. So that’s a new one for me. Thanks.
I’m pleased you’ve got it working now. Thanks for mentioning this album, which I listened to yesterday. I have a couple of his already, and really enjoyed this one. I listened to it on Qobuz at 24/192. It seems remarkable that it’s possible to stream in such high resolution.