Gang-Twanger
Resident Wharfedaliophool
the clicking between sample rates is a mechanical relay throwing in most cases. my Denon DVD-9000 did this. each different sample rate has a different clocking setup (i think), and so some switching has to occur in the DAC circuit. depending on who you talk to, relay switching is sonically preferable to IC or transistor switching (i believe the Schiit website mentions this), even though the latter are mechanically quiet. my Accuphase integrated does all source switching, as well as some other settings, via relays too -- in that case it's to shorten signal paths and keep them freer of distortion.
you can also sometimes get relay clicking when playing back dirty or scratched CD's or otherwise error-ridden files. i've had this happen a couple times, IIRC, though it could have been relays inside the transport section... at any rate, if your DAC is clicking regularly during playback, that is a glitch in the relay control circuitry, and you should get it fixed. if it's clicking between back-to-back Redbook tracks (or high-rez tracks of the same rate), that's annoying, but it could be a design choice.
the white boxes are the signal relays:
EDIT: i should clarify that these relay noises are for the most part purely mechanical, emanating from the Denon's DAC section. there might be a slight audible thump or click in the signal, but i've never really noticed it. if you're hearing a lot of noise through your speakers when the Bifrost relays activate, that's probably a sign of a less than perfect implementation.
Not sure about the OP, but the clicking I would hear (with the HRT MSII) was when I was still using Foobar. I love Foobar, but I was having a problem getting the WASAPI plug-in to work right. I could get it dialed-in to work with hi-res 24/96 (by lowering the buffering rate and and messing with a few other settings), but then I'd go to play a redbook file, and I'd get the clicking sound. Same thing would happen if I got it dialed-in-enough to play redbook stuff. I could get either, but not at the same time, or it would make that nonstop clicking sound. So, I switched to the Virtual Audio Cable plug-in and used VLC media-player because it was plug-&-play with V.A.C (not so with Foobar, sadly... I'm still trying to get it to work because I miss Foobar... VLC uses more CPU-power than I'd like because it runs independently as far as I know...Foobar uses less CPU/RAM than any player out there, and yet it's one of the most-powerful.... That said, I am getting great results from the V.A.C. plug-in. Not only did it do away with the clicking (for both redbook AND hi-res), it seemed to do a better job on my computer than WASAPI. Like a veil was lifted. Maybe it just happens to work really-well on my kind of setup.
*EDIT* - Just to reiterate what I was saying about VLC drawing a lot of power, I just checked my task-manager, and VLC is drawing about 25,000-28,000K right now while playing a 24/96 vinyl-rip. That's about 7,000K-10,000K higher than Foobar would draw. My computer is just an entry-level Compaq laptop, so it's not very-powerful, and that's why I've had to do a lot of sidestepping and modifying to get it to work as the brain of a computer-based stereo system. The clicking I was experiencing seemed to be the fault of my laptop's modest capability, best I can tell, rather than the fault of my DAC.
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