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

PS Audio claims this phenomenon to be normal and probably related to ac brown outs. I am beginning to think that what I am experiencing is ac fluctuation and I am experiencing good sound.

@markcasazza +1 "Every streamer is a single purpose computer and every computer operating system benefits from the occasional reboot."

@mitchb "I find by doing this once every 5 days or so much improves the sound quality” 

Wondering how PS Audio will respond to such observation! 

I’ve had some unexpected power outages and if the power comes on fairly quickly, no, I hear no difference. 

I have definitely heard improvement from restarting a dac, but this was in cases of very obvious distortion setting in for reasons I don’t understand. I can’t say that I’ve ever noticed more subtle improvements from a restart, but based on the extreme experiences I suspect more subtle problems can set in too.

Actually, come to think of it, in one of the extreme cases the problem was explained to me by the manufacturer as an issue with static charge building up. They recommended unplugging and then plugging the dac back in. It always worked, and needed to be done about once a week. In another case the manufacturer refused to acknowledge the problem, but a person on an internet forum suggested that the power supply they had supplied wasn’t providing adequate current. I got a bigger power supply and that problem went away.

The cases I don't understand involve sources that are not very good, like optical TV out, which has a lot of jitter in it. I know this because some better dacs I tried to feed with that signal wouldn't play at all unless I relaxed the DAC's jitter tolerance. Some of them have a setting for that.  I don't understand why it sometimes goes out of whack all at once and sounds highly distorted. But I suspect it has something to do with that jitter. 

I had a Aurlic streamer that constantly needed rebooting to function. My DACS have not sounded different after power down and up. 

Every streamer is a single purpose computer and every computer operating system benefits from the occasional reboot. It does not surprise me to hear of a streamer's performance improve with a power cycle.

Now a DAC is another story. They are much simpler devices and are much less likly o be improved by a power cycle unless you do have a heat/ventilation issue.

Is for my I build my own streamers with a custom Linux that caters to sound processing.

My DAC sounds better after I flush all the toilets in the house

🤣🤣🤣

My DAC sounds better after I flush all the toilets in the house.

+1 @audioman58 

My BDA-3 dac and Roon Titan have been on since coming out of their boxes.  They were powered off once for ~2 days due to a powerful storm  and subsequent power outage. Noticeable difference in SQ upon power up.

As stated above the Directstream is clearing out the cache and resetting/synchronizing clock/buffers etc.

I would keep doing it, but only for the minute you had said above.

Regards,

barts 

brge,

 I have asked Ted Smith, on a few occasions, about this issue of sounding better after powering off and on thus reinitializing the dac and he claims it to be perfectly normal not unlike “degaussing” or “demagnetizing” the dac. Ted has said that I am not alone and that there’s no problem with my particular dac. He said that some owners of both the Mk1 and Mk2 notice this phenomenon. It’s not as though the sound goes bad but it can just sound better with occasional reboots.

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.
 

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 !!

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. 

@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. 

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 - I would contact PS Audio and ask them.  PS Audio DACs are different from pure chip based DAC as they use FPGA (field-programmable gate array) with custom software to process the signal.  There could be a problem there.  Also, have you upgraded to the newest software version?

...From PS Audio's sales brochere:

DirectStream converts every input signal, both PCM and DSD, to single-bit, high sample rate 20X DSD signal. Use of a FPGA rather than an off the shelf DAC chip provides immense processing power, resulting in complete lack of digital glare, and allows the owner to download OS updates as they are released.

No idea what a one minute shutdown would cure, and especially with the DAC getting hot.

With my Holo May Kitsune DAC attention must be paid to ventilation. Over-heating can be an issue otherwise. The original placement of the DAC and its separate power supply was technically inverted which was a mistake not made plain in the instructions. Placing the power supply atop the DAC - even with 3 inch tall spacers - could sometimes result in a chirping noise coming from the speakers. This was due, as I finally surmised, to overheating the DAC after an hour or two of playing. Placing the DAC atop the power supply stopped this annoyance.

My component rack is by the nature of my space vertically oriented with little lateral space around the component, so stacking a two part component such as the DAC and its power supply was an obvious convenience. Lately I have decided to just affix the DAC’s power supply to the side of the component cabinet thereby taking the over-heating issue completely out of the loop.

I haven’t tried it, but based on what you are doing, it may be something is getting too hot. Make sure it’s ventilated.

There have bee a number of small compute intense boxes over the years I’ve owned which malfunctioned due to the manufacturer not taking care to ventilate and add appropriate heat sinks. These were usually wifi routers but also indludes Roon like streamers. Additional cooling often helped.

My Mytek DAC also suffers this if fed very high sample rate music, so I put pucks underneath it and limit the signal rate.

With the wifi routers I sometimes would drill a hole over an offending chip and add a heat sink and micro fan. Not saying you need to, just saying it’s happened so often that I’m kind of surprised it doesn’t happen now.

I'd feel the dac and look for any particularly hot areas above or below and take care that any hot areas get extra ventilation.