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Denafrips Pontus II Clicks Or Static?

There have been some who have reported clicks or static occasionally with their Denafrips Pontus II DAC units.  And there is a test measurement review of the Pontus II 12th on the golden sound website talking about the following:

"When DACs oversample, they can sometimes encounter a situation where the reconstructed/interpolated waveform goes above 0dBfs (the maximum possible digital value)."

"The Pontus 2 is susceptible to intersample overs, and unfortunately, in a particularly bad way."

"The Pontus 2 does not clip, but instead when a sample value reaches above the maximum, it ‘wraps around’ to the minimum negative value, causing a huge sudden transient which will be very audible and may appear as crackling/popping."

Has anyone with a Pontus II encountered this anomaly when playing CDs?  If so, can you elaborate about that?  I am aware that the Pontus II can be firmware upgraded, so if this is an occasional issue, it could be eliminated with an upgrade.

 

 

fastcat95

Showing 1 response by mksun

mksun
635 posts
 

I have had my Pontus II nearly two years and have never experienced any pops or clicks. I run mine in NOS mode and use a Coax connection to my CD transport and Toslink to my streamer. I wanted to connect my Pontus simultaneously to both my McIntosh Integrated and my Topping headphone amp. Alvin at Vinshine stated that using both the XLR and RCA outputs simultaneously would seriously degrade performance. Alvin proposed a work around and sent me a design of a custom “Y” cable which connected to the XLR outs on the Pontus and split off into dual RCA connections to both amplifiers. I had the folks at Morrow Audio build this custom cable to Alvin’s design and it has performed flawlessly. I wanted to mention this performance degradation Caveat to anyone who wants to connect their Pontus to dual amps although it probably has nothing to do with this pop and click issue. I have been extremely happy with my Pontus and am very sorry to hear that this great product has been marred with this annoying defect.

 

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