After many months of struggling and major frustration, Aurender loaded a special firmware update on my Aurender N200. This was after my dealer replicated the issue with an N200 of his. He had extensive discussions with Aurender and conducted much testing. Thankfully now, Aurender was able to fix the problem with this special firmware update. The tick / pop is gone. So, the issue had absolutely nothing to do with my DAC, none whatsoever! It was a fault on the N200 caused by some software update.