Well as usual I have backed myself into a corner that is difficult to extract myself out of.
In a span of about 2 months both of my computers died unnatural deaths. The laptop became filled with aluminum dust from a garage incident that made things go sparky inside and my big desktop music server died in some inexplicable manner involving gravity and a stairway.
So I decided to throw some money Dell's way and buy a new laptop. A new Dell 15" 7000 series with an I5 processor with a 128GB SSD and a 1TB hard drive was put on order. After waiting 3 weeks it showed up. I took a couple of days to get all of the extra crap off of it, installed JRiver 24 on it and other junk like that. Well then I hooked it up to my Wyred 4 Sound DAC and nothing! The DAC wasn't visiable to the computer!
I loaded the drivers a couple of more times and still nothing.
SO I sent a Email to Wyred, they responded that the DAC didn't talk to the latest version of Windows 10, but they had several ideas on what I could do.
One would be messing with the operating system, no guarantees that it would work. Other ideas were buying one of their new DACs, but I'm more or less out of play money at this time (I've bought 2 new cars and a new motorcycle this year). Yet another idea would be installing a USB to S/PDIF converter.
The converter is looking like the best rout at this time because I'm still happy with my current DAC.
Oh, by the way, to play music I am currently using a $25 Walmart DVD player digital outed into my DAC. Is is silly stupid! And I also hate messing with CD's, what a pain after years of computer based music. At least I kept the CD's in boxes in a closet.
Oh well, what do you folks think I should do? Save for a new DAC or just get a USB to S/PDIF converter?

Hi Donnie,

Which W4S dac are you using? Currently I'm using a W4S DAC 1LE with Windows 10, I found it works fine with asio but not wasapi through usb. Prior to getting the DAC 1LE I was using the W4S DAC 1. With that dac I used a usb to spdif coax converter, the W4S uLink. As I remember the driver package for the uLink worked fine with Windows 10 and allowed me to play 24/192 files, the DAC 1 only did 24/96 via usb.


Regards,
Ed

Hi Donnie,

That's the same dac I used to have it worked very well with the uLink in Windows 10. I don't know if you're aware of it but at the moment W4S is doing a clearance and have the uLink for $199, that's $100 less than the regular price. They also have a number of older dac's at very good prices like the dac 1Le for $599 without the femto clock upgrade.

When I replaced my dac 1 with the Le I added the femto upgrade, as nice as the dac 1 was the Le with the upgrade is better and does up to dsd 128.


Regards,

Ed

Well I went ahead and bought a new cheap DAC. A Grace Design M900. It is tiny!
So far it sounds pretty OK. I am up-converting everything into DSD just because I can.
Time will tell if it works out or not.
I gave my Wyred DAC to a guy at work who asked me about how to use his computer for audio. He about died when he looked up how much I paid for it. He is going to freak out when he finds out how much the Mapleshade USB cable I'm giving him cost.
Gotta keep paying forward on this stuff, good Karma.

Wow, that's very cool of you Donnie! I hope he really appreciates the magic you just gave him!


Re: Upsampling, with my DACs I've found 128 as a minimum before it really starts to sound good. DSD64 just doesn't sound much different than the source files to me (again, with my DACs).