Chromecast audio

[phofman]

it does cause occasional dropouts on 24/96 tracks only

The internal buffer between the asynchronous soundcard and reclocker clocks does inevitably sooner or later over/underrun. Asynchronous reclocking is technically wrong, professional devices usually do not use it, only "audiophiles" gadgets. Either asynchronous resampling, or using only single clock in the whole chain.

 

[Speedysteve7]

The internal buffer between the asynchronous soundcard and reclocker clocks does inevitably sooner or later over/underrun. Asynchronous reclocking is technically wrong, professional devices usually do not use it, only "audiophiles" gadgets. Either asynchronous resampling, or using only single clock in the whole chain.

Yeah, it's not got long for my world [emoji3]

 

[phofman]

Quite easily. Manufacturers of the reclocking devices cannot put in a long buffer as that would raise overall latency to unacceptable level.Let's say 100ms latency at 96kHz (that already ruins AV lipsync), with 6Hz clock difference (nothing unusual) - i.e. 6 frames per second, 100ms = 9600 frames => 1600 secs = 26 minutes between under/overflows.

 

[bwaslo]

I'd think some clever implementation would detect silent breaks like between tracks or just very low level instances and preemptively handle the under/over runs there? Wouldn't work for long uninterrupted tracks though.

 

[pos]

Why bother with intermediate reclockers when good ASRCs are now ubiquitous in DACs?

 

[Speedysteve7]

Digging into CCA 24/96 problems

Doing some research into CCA's shortcomings at 24/96 there were a number of users who reported dropouts with CCA.
It got narrowed down to working fine with some DACs and not with others.
Seems Najda was in the 'works fine' category.

The problems were reported to Google engineers and they indicated a new SW update was coming.
That update never came as Google ceased to support CCA and the support threads were locked.

I now have a Mutec MC3 reclocker here and whilst it cleans up the CCA sound amazingly well, it too suffers dropouts from CCA - only on 24/96.

I have it confirmed by several other friend users that other streamers
(Sonore ultraRendu being one of them) can stream to the Mutec at 24/96, 24/192 no problem at all.

So I don't believe in the buffer length thing in the reclockers.
My dropout problems lie with CCA. Just lucky it worked with Najda's DAC although the sound is not as good as it could be.

I'm going to trial a Sonore ultraRendu (if I can get a loaner), and play it off against RPi/Kali reclocker (uses I2S in into Najda) and see.
The latter has the rather hateful Volumio user experience which was primarily why I looked for a solution that could connect with Qobuz without going through Volumio.