Does anyone experience sound improvement from restarting power off and on of DAC?

Years ago I read something about this and clearing a buffer, memory cache (or something) was the reason given for the improvement in SQ.

DeKay

@mitchb My latest Auralic product (Altair 2.2) refreshes firmware on every reboot. Which is a great feature for those of us who aren’t always paying attention to the latest updates.
I think you are implementing best practices by rebooting, especially by hard rebooting by which you are resetting the hardware. If nothing else, it should help reset digital voltage levels to valid ‘High’ and ‘Low’ levels; they can get hung up at levels that are neither fully ‘On’ or ‘Off’ and generally restrict communication. I can recall having to drop power at both ends of a serial RS232 link in order to restore communication over some relatively long line links (200+ ft). I imagine the same limitations apply even in a high speed chassis as found in modern DACs, but I could be wrong. I just think you may not be imagining things, but as other contributors have suggested, the matter deserves further investigation. 

Seems spurious unless you flush cache in the process. Normally though cache sits in the streamer, not the Dac. And restarting the clock is generally deemed highly counterproductic because of destabilisation.Either way, if it works keep doing it. 

If you want a passive award winning audio improvement for equipment breakin 

and track3 a 5 minute system tuneup that works I have recommended this for years 

the Isotek system runin cd 

as far as your unit it may be a bad capacitor possibly . I would contact PS Audio

ths is not normal if anything it should sound better left on for its at its optimum running temperature I have been in several audio clubs for years and owned a Audio store , and have spoken with many designers ,you have a defective unit 

PS audio Tech support for sure !!

I also used to have a Directstream DAC MK1 and I did notice the same thing: the sound improved whenever I would recycle the power, or even better, when reloading the firmware.

After reading some of the posts from Ted Smith regarding the digital filtering going on in the DAC, I assumed that the sound improved because following those events (i.e. power recycle or firmware reload), the memory where all the previous filtered values gets cleared and we are probably listening to a purer sound (i.e. less filtered). If I were you, I would ask your question directly to Ted Smith via the PS Audio forum webpage.