Mine wasn’t losing grip in the beginning but you could make it lose connection by fiddling with the cable. It’s way too brittle considering the price.
Regarding the cables: It sends a fair amount of data so worn out connectors can have a negative impact.
Edit: It seems the uDAC 4 and 5 have gone back to the much more sturdy USB type B.
Have you tested it against any other machines recently?
Recently, no but I can.
It worked flawlessly till the day I upgraded to Ryzen from Bulldozer. The very first day, the very first minutes of the system being together this started.
I will plug in my NUC when I get home and try it with that and see what happens.
Tonights testing:
Opening chrome sometimes causes cutting out, which us odd as usually chrome makes it not cut out. Sometimes right on loading chrome, sometimes when I open a silent tab like the forums. This is not tied to CPU spikes.
Foobar2000:
This previously never had issues but testing things that make sound individually opening chrome while playing music did get it to cut out, this is the first time I can recall this happening.
Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit Remastered
Audio cutting out not related to CPU spikes or Network spikes. They don’t seem to visibly relate to anything.
In game actually racing everything is perfect, BUT on certain menus (not all of them) or during loading cut scenes (which are in engine just like racing) it does cut out.
I also got a discord call by chance while playing and it caused it too but I was also alt tabbed for that call.
I joined a discord voice chat to test and it did happen more often when in there with two other people, there were no network spikes and the CPU didn’t spike either.
I also quit discord completely while playing to see if that did anything, it still cut out when I was alt tabbed. Does not correspond to any spikes in CPU or network
Limiting the two above noted states to 99% does not help.
Limiting them to 90% also does not help.
USB Selective Suspend is disabled
Loose/Bad Connection from the MicroUSB:
Wiggling the cable has zero effect, I think I can rule this out.
Testing the DAC with the NUC:
Works fine there.
Another cable:
Finally found another cable that would work and it does not fix it either.
Monitors USB hub:
No good there either.
Though interestingly Need For Speed does not seem to be cutting out now… But everything else is just as bad as ever.
Starting a download on Steam to stress that does not cause any cutting out.
This appeared to go no where but I will leave it there just in case.
But it is the only thing sort of consistent so far, every time I open chrome which is triggering cutouts every time without fail, there is a large but thin spike in network traffic.
But on the other hand the NFS audio cutting out is not related to the network.
Though the problem was worse on other USB ports away from the Ethernet port, including the front panel ports.
So once again I have exhausted all options and come with absolutely nothing to show for it.
Thanks for the suggestions. I guess it is 1701-D on loop forever to fix it.
Well it’s probably of no comfort to you but I really like my Fiio K3.
Yeah… yeah…
I will actually try my Scarlett Solo and see if that has the same problems, it is also a USB and generic windows audio driver.
I really can’t think of anything else to try.
Hmmmm… mmmm… maaayyybee?
This needs more testing.
That last bit might be important.
I am using it through the hub right now and it all appears to be working… Almost. When I open chrome it does cut out, then recovers and after that so far there is no issue. On Discord right now it is fine, played some Need For Speed and that was fine, have Foobar2000 playing and it is fine.
Other than that one oddity when opening a fresh chrome so far so good? @mehmedbasic You might have done it.
I will report back after a few days, or earlier if it is not holding up.
This is one hell of a rabbit hole you stubled upon!
It’s very weird to me that it might be power related since you have a good motherboard. But it also can be part of the issue, for sure.
What I’d do now is maybe contacting MSI about it and see what they have to say about it.
If you had an Nvidia GPU with a USB C on it I would’ve suggest you to try that too to rule out any possible issues with the USB controller.
So I have the EXACT same problem and solution with the sound bar I use as my computer speaker
Yeah it is an odd one. I wonder if it is just a shielding issue with the motherboard, just too much noise within itself.
It will take me a bit because I am lazy and need to gather these ramblings into a proper format but yes I will contact MSi about it.
I unfortunately don’t have an nVidia card to test it.
@GigaBusterEXE do you also have an MSi board and possibly even the very same one?
no gigabyte, I’m pretty sure its a power saving feature in my sound bar
Huh, Okay. So same solution but vastly different problems.
Okay 4 days on and everything is holding up okay.
We’ll almost. The issue when chrome is opened for the first time still persists, but otherwise everything else works fine.
So I am happy enough with the outcome as I can atkrast play games, talk to people and listen to music uninterrupted 99% of the time. Just have to keep it in mind when first starting up the PC.
Thank you @mehmedbasic
Update: All has been good since, it still has the oddness of whenever chrome is launched it will still cut out for a few seconds but then recover and be fine again from there on out until all instances of chrome are closed and then relaunched again causing it again for a moment and again recover and continue on. But I can live with that.
On to new news about this though.
I am not sure if this is my problem but apparently there are issues with 500 series chipsets and Gen4 PCIe causing USB 2.0 ports to cut out, sounds very similar to my problem. Though the DAC is USB 2.0, no matter which port I plugged it into it caused it so I am not sure if it 100% the same issue or if it is only things at USB 2.0 speeds regardless of the ports, I will have to look into this more.
The solution is apparently to disable PCIe4 in the BIOS. I could try this but considering it is almost perfect for me right now I kind of don’t want to mess with it, and regardless of if I use the speed at all my NVMe M.2 is PCIe4 and I don’t want to go switching its speed if I don’t have to just in case as it is my boot drive.
As noted in Paul’s News
So Update on the situation, the AMD fix in the form of AGESA 1.2.0.2 bios update from MSi for my motherboard (X570 Gaming Edge Wifi) has done absolutely nothing for the problem.
So as of right now the partial 99% fix is still running it through a USB Hub.
i am using zen dac from ifi , and while using foobar2000 with asio plug ins and all when i am playing songs in foobar the dac works fine but when i want to use other apps like winamp or youtube in chrome there voice is cut off and not working but when i disconnect the dac and reconnect it and close the foobar its working normally again. Can someone help me resove this issue ?
Little late reading this thread, but I have an FX-Audio DAC that comes with this god awful ugly blue plastic-style covered USB cable. I attempted to use a different cable and it just refused to work. I don’t know what’ special about it, but I can’t use any cable other than that ugly blue plastic garbage.
Now I had a similar issue when I got my DAC, thus attempting to change cables. Does your DAC come with an AC adapter for external power or is it powered via USB? Mine came with an AC adapter and I found that I needed to find a different outlet to put it in. Not sure why, but a different outlet solved mine cutting in and out.
Sounds like that is made for phones with USB-C or for laptops. 4.4 is a balanced output. Yeh, I would just try to cancel that order.
Hey, this is still in a semi resolved state. Though I can tell you for sure, the cable was not the cause just an amplifier of the main problem.
Ultimately this is a problem on certain generation AMD motherboards where the PCIe Gen 4 signalling is in some way interfering with the USB. There have been UEFI updates to fix it but none have worked for me so far, though I have yet to try the latest one, I have tried a few after the supposed fix was issued and I still have the same problem. You can fix it by force disabling the PCIe Gen 4 capability, and manually enforcing Gen 3 only. I do not want to do this, I am using a Gen 4 NVMe SSD and while I am sure I don’t use that speed I would like to be getting what I am using… if that makes sense.
As for the USB C Balanced DAC…
https://forum.level1techs.com/t/post-what-new-thing-you-acquired-recently/149881/8282?u=zibob