My external DAC/AMP is skipping small sounds like deleting a file, emptying trash, error bell in terminal,etc. Why? Is it Normal?

Ishan_J · August 6, 2022

I bought a new DAC/AMP Fiio K3 (2021), this is my first DAC/AMP, I never used anything like this before. I noticed that it skips small sounds in macOS like deleting a file, emptying trash, error bell in the terminal, posting a tweet, etc. same thing happens on Windows and Linus also, it's just more noticeable in macOS because it has sounds in its UI for a number of things.

I did some troubleshooting and these are my Observations:

1. I found out that it skips the sound specifically when there is a short stream of audio like what I mentioned before.

2. If there are many sounds coming in a queue it will miss the first sound and then accurately plays all sounds in a queue without any lag.

3. If I am playing music, there is a continuous sound stream continuously going into the computer's device; it doesn't skip anything.

4. If nothing is going into the DAC for 1 or 2 mins, then if I start some music then it will skip some microseconds of that song and then plays the whole song without any issue.

My Conclusion: DAC turns itself off for power-saving mode if we don't use it for some time, I don't know why. because it's a desktop device that doesn't have any batteries in it, it's connected the whole time to the computer or a laptop. I don't think it's the delay of signal because it needs to travel from computer to DAC from a wire or a dongle because after that skipping it plays everything without lag even if you game on it there is close to no lag in competitive games also.

My Questions:

1. Is my conclusion make any sense?

2. Why is this happening?

3. Is it normal?

4. Why it doesn't happen when we use the onboard DAC of a motherboard or a laptop?

Thanks in advance!

Psittac · August 7, 2022

Makes perfect sense, gotta be a sleep function of some sort. I can't help you solve the issue but that sounds right to me

Ishan_J · November 13, 2022

After troubleshooting for months I realised that I was using Microsoft's UBD 2.0 drivers. So I downloaded Fiio K3 DAC driver from thier website, which is very hard to find here is the link if you want. I found this link from a reddit post.

After installing this drivers problem has been solved successfully. Now I can also here booting sound of Windows and all small stream of audio like error and notifications which was not possible before. I haven't tested on the other OS like Ubuntu and macOs, I don't thing it will work because lack of driver but I will post my observations on this thread.

Thank you everyone for your guidance and support.