RME ADI-2 DAC

My ADI-2's USB interface seems to have died on me after 2 months of normal use. Tried a couple of different USB cables on 3 different computers but none of them detect the connection and the RME's screen shows USB disconnected.

Time to RMA the RME and move on to bigger and better things I guess.

 

Yours is the third incident I could find reported . Seems there is some vulnerability when swapping usb connections . Can I ask , where the computer and RME both powered on or off when the connection was changed ?

 

Yep I also found a couple of other people on RME forums having the same issue.

Both were powered on, and from what I've read, that was also the case for the other 2 people.

 

So basically, never unplug the USB from the DAC when it's on?

I've been keeping my eye on stock, but shipments seem to keep getting delayed.

 

To be safe, yeah. That said, I've transported it to and from work many dozens of times and never had anything go wrong. I probably power the device off before plugging in the USB and plug in the USB before powering the device on, but I've never been careful to do it in a particular order (just habit: I tend to make all connections to everything before power anything on).

 

Yeah, make sure the device is off before plugging in the USB. That's what fried mine, both the PC and DAC were powered on for me, it never entered my mind that the USB could do any damage.

I can confirm these seem to sell like hotcakes, Sweetwater couldn't replace mine because it was out of stock so I talked them into refunding me instead, which is a real stroke of luck.

 

I hope this is specific to RME DAC as I do change my USB when my DAC and laptop is on only thing I pause my music.

 

I find it hard to believe that plugging/un-plugging a USB can damage the device. It's not a TRS, which shorts out, before making proper contact. Maybe static killed the USB receiver chip, but it should jump to ground plane first and foremost. Strange.

 

This conversation prompted me to look it up and apparently the USB spec "supports" hot swapping, though it is device dependant. Fact is most modern equipment is and we just sort of expect it. Hard to imagine that a recently designed device such as this RME DAC would not be hot swappable...

 

From what I was told by someone on HF this unit has a floating ground on the USB interface which is why the frying was possible?

I am a complete electronics noob, so take that with a grain of salt. All I can tell you is that I used the unit for 2 months with a NUC with no issue. Then I moved a desktop PC next to it, powered the PC on, waited for it to fully boot and unplugged the RME from the NUC, plugged it into the desktop PC's USB rear (motherboard) port, and since then it stopped working, showing USB disconnected on the RME and nothing detected by any PC I tried it on. Optical/Coax inputs still work just fine.

 

Should also add that after this, I tried plugging in several devices on the same USB port of the desktop PC, none of them had issues, all were detected by the PC.

 

I just got mine but am confused about the sampling rate not automatically switching to match the source in WASAPI Exclusive.

 

Never mind, apparently that's by design. You have to go into MADIface and change it manually...

 

I am curious- did you ever get around to doing this?

 

RME released a new firmware update. Been a while since the last one. https://www.forum.rme-audio.de/viewtopic.php?id=28859

 

Being able to map the DA filter and crossfeed to the remote is very nice.

 

And new amber color graphic display.

 

And at last a quick press on the volume knob mutes and unmutes the output - something that, IMO, it should have done from the very beginning.

 

I'm a totally noob and have some noob questions.
Does 96kHz/24bit count as DSD ?
Does converting a track to PCM mean converting it to 44.1kHz/16bit ?
Can i play a 96kHz/24bit track through the headphone out without downsampling it ?

 

No, and no.

PCM stands for pulse code modulation and is essentially a method of converting analogue information to binary via a series of pulses (ergo "pulse code modulation") that is ubiquitous; it's what's used for MP3, WAV, FLAC, OGG, AIFF, and others. You have the basic Redbook (44.1kHz), a less-compromised 48kHz, and also high res stuff (96kHz, 192kHz) as well as DXD, which stands for Digital eXtreme Definition (ugh) and seems to be trying to confuse itself for DSD despite "just" being PCM, albeit extremely high-resolution PCM at 352.8kHz.

DSD is a way of encoding information in a different manner than PCM. Bit depth (oh god that's something else entirely I don't wanna bother talking about) is significantly less than standard PCM but the sampling rate is obscenely high, 2.82MHz, which is 64x standard PCM (Mega v kilo Hertz).

I typed out the above before realising I could just tell you it's all available to read on the internet. f**k. Ah well. Wait why didn't you just google this?