Henry Flower
100+ Head-Fier
- Joined
- Aug 18, 2006
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I recently bought an Alien DAC, and am having a problem with it. I'm hoping against hope that it's not a hardware issue, because I don't have so much as a screwdriver to open it up.
The DAC works fine for anything from a couple of minutes to half an hour or so, then I get a very loud burst of white noise. The noise stops if I pause the track, and restarts if I un-pause. If I move to a different point in the track, it sometimes goes away, sometimes doesn't.
I only have two clues as to what might be up: someone in the Alien builders' thread reported a white noise problem, but that was using XP (I'm using Vista SP1). There doesn't seem to be anything in that thread about whether the problem was resolved.
Also, the only time I got more than an hour's use without the problem occurring was when foobar showed the output device as 'USB device' rather than 'Burr Brown Japan...'. No idea if that's relevant.
Any thoughts?
*added* A couple more clues! I've been using it on an XP system for the last half an hour without any problems. Also, I found a thread on the M-Audio transit support forums where someone reported the same issue using their beta driver for Vista, triggered by DirectX games or system tasks. That would fit with my experience: the first time this happened was when I was playing Half Life 2. Not using it for games wouldn't be a hardship for me, but if system tasks are triggering it, that's more of a problem!
The DAC works fine for anything from a couple of minutes to half an hour or so, then I get a very loud burst of white noise. The noise stops if I pause the track, and restarts if I un-pause. If I move to a different point in the track, it sometimes goes away, sometimes doesn't.
I only have two clues as to what might be up: someone in the Alien builders' thread reported a white noise problem, but that was using XP (I'm using Vista SP1). There doesn't seem to be anything in that thread about whether the problem was resolved.
Also, the only time I got more than an hour's use without the problem occurring was when foobar showed the output device as 'USB device' rather than 'Burr Brown Japan...'. No idea if that's relevant.
Any thoughts?
*added* A couple more clues! I've been using it on an XP system for the last half an hour without any problems. Also, I found a thread on the M-Audio transit support forums where someone reported the same issue using their beta driver for Vista, triggered by DirectX games or system tasks. That would fit with my experience: the first time this happened was when I was playing Half Life 2. Not using it for games wouldn't be a hardship for me, but if system tasks are triggering it, that's more of a problem!
