Tír Na HiFi

I've been struggling mightily with getting a new Ciunas DAC up and running on my system. I'm hoping that someone here has figured out how to get it working with ALSA, and can help me!

My setup is a Cubox-i4. I've tried several versions of the Volumio distribution, including the latest 1.4; I've also tried Voyage MuBox which is running an extremely up-to-date Linux kernel 3.14.

The behavior is essentially this - the systems seem to recognize the DAC, I get expected outputs from "aplay -l" and looking at various status outputs in /proc/asound/ etc. I can play audio from the command line, using aplay, and I will see that the system lists the card as running. However, it is rare for me to get sound out of the DAC.

On occasion, I have been able to get sound out of the DAC with aplay or speaker-test, but it is not at all reliable under either distribution. It mostly doesn't work at all, but sometimes after a reboot and a re-plug of the USB cable, it will play sound out to my amp and speakers.

The most reliable/repeatable pattern I have found (running Volumio 1.4) is if I remove the USB from the Cubox with the Ciunas on, plug it into my Mac, turn off the Ciunas and then back on again, it will then properly play out from my Mac. (The Ciunas will not play audio out of the Mac unless it is power cycled off and on, even though the system recognizes the DAC and you can select it as an output.) And, when I un-plug it from my Mac and back into the Cubox, it will magically play audio via aplay or speaker-test - only until a reboot. Once I reboot the Cubox, sound disappears.

From here, the behavior diverges with Volumio and with Voyage MuBox. I cannot get MPD to play sound on either system - even after the procedure described above connecting it to the Mac etc. that will reliably play out audio via aplay and/or speaker-test on the command line. Both seem to be configured properly, but I get MPD errors on Volumio about not being able to open the selected ALSA device. I have tried many different MPD configs that I found in various places, but none seemed to work.

On MuBox, I can successfully run MPD in verbose mode, and connect an MPD client and play back audio without the ALSA errors I get when running Volumio - and see that it is reporting successful playback and output to the Ciunas. But there's no sound out to my amp.

Based on the fact that the Ciunas cannot reliably play audio even when the ALSA outputs indicate a successful connection and expected status messages in /proc/asound/, I don't think this is an MPD issue. I think there's something deeper going on with ALSA and this DAC, but it's beyond my expertise to figure out what it is. Can anyone help?

Sorry haven't a clue on that have you taken it up with John?

i know it definitely works ive tried it but ive a head like a seive

I've asked John but he's only been able to say that if the system is USB Audio 2.0 compliant it should be good. I think he's too busy to dig into the minutia of any one setup in particular...

If anyone else can help, I'll happily provide any output of the system if it helps to troubleshoot... I've spent easily 40 or so hours at this point, and can't get it to work.

Hi Brian
You told me the Ciunas worked fine on the Mac - this is different to what you are saying here, no?
If there's a problem on the Mac too then we have to find out more.
When you say "The Ciunas will not play audio out of the Mac unless it is power cycled off and on, even though the system recognizes the DAC and you can select it as an output." - this is new information that I didn't have before

Can you make sure that the Mac hasn't set the Ciunas output to 384KHz sample rate in Midi - it won't output sound if this is the case. Set it to < 384KHz & try again & report back, please.

Hi John -

Confirmed that the Mac is not re-setting the sampling rate. It's set to 192k per your instructions.

I'm sorry I didn't include the info that the DAC needed to be powered off and on again to work properly on my mac. I've assumed that since it works just fine once you do that, that this is normal operation.

Just to be crystal clear - if the DAC is powered on when you plug it into the Mac, it will not play audio, though the system will recognize it - you can select it as an output in the sound control panel or via option-clicking the speaker icon in the menu bar, but no sound comes out on playback. From there, if you power off the DAC, and then power it back on, playback will proceed normally and the DAC appears to function as expected. The DAC will continue to play back normally from this point - I can't say I've logged more than a few hours of playback this way, but it appears to work fine once it's up and running. I have not tried rebooting the mac to see if the DAC will operate normally after a reboot. I also have not tested the behavior in un-plugging and re-plugging the data USB cable once the DAC is working, to see if it stays that way. But I can try any of that out this evening if that would be helpful.

Thanks for taking the time to look into this!

bdouble wrote:Hi John -

Confirmed that the Mac is not re-setting the sampling rate. It's set to 192k per your instructions.

I'm sorry I didn't include the info that the DAC needed to be powered off and on again to work properly on my mac. I've assumed that since it works just fine once you do that, that this is normal operation.

Just to be crystal clear - if the DAC is powered on when you plug it into the Mac, it will not play audio, though the system will recognize it - you can select it as an output in the sound control panel or via option-clicking the speaker icon in the menu bar, but no sound comes out on playback. From there, if you power off the DAC, and then power it back on, playback will proceed normally and the DAC appears to function as expected. The DAC will continue to play back normally from this point - I can't say I've logged more than a few hours of playback this way, but it appears to work fine once it's up and running. I have not tried rebooting the mac to see if the DAC will operate normally after a reboot. I also have not tested the behavior in un-plugging and re-plugging the data USB cable once the DAC is working, to see if it stays that way. But I can try any of that out this evening if that would be helpful.

Thanks for taking the time to look into this!

Thanks Brian & I responded via email before I read this.
However, it's no harm to have this info here.

I haven't heard of this behaviour with my Ciunas DAC & the Mac before but then there may not be many people who plug in a powered DAC into a powered computer - it's really not recommended to do this. Same as it's not recommended to plug in a powered DAC to a powered preamp/amp.

However, I have done this before on a PC (slap my wrist) & the DAC is recognised & works without having to power off/on again- so maybe this is a Mac thing. Any Mac users who know anything about this behaviour (with any self-powered DAC)?

Update - after a lot of help from John, the issue came down to the Ciunas needing an Amanero firmware downgrade to work with ALSA. I guess the latest firmware has issues under Linux.

In any case, now that that's sorted, the DAC is performing beautifully.

John, thanks much for your help! I hope this info can save others the many hours I spent banging my head against the tiny little Cubox.

Very happy with this setup now that it's fully working!

Yes, glad we got it sorted, Brian & thanks for posting the update