First, thank you very much for making this amazing Varese system! Every single dCS upgrade I experienced over the last ~20 years was significant, but Varese is especially impressive because it must be increasingly more difficult to pull it off when you are already so close to perfection. I am very grateful to dCS for making it possible to enjoy music and sound so much - I am in heaven!
I imagine the system software updates will be making the system increasingly robust. While I am very happy that Varese is already available, I do have a few questions here:
With about 15% probability, when I wake Varese up from standby, the soundstage is heavily tilted to either left or right (both speakers play, but one side dominates). The one-sidedness is noticeable if you know the track, but one would not necessarily notice it immediately if the track was new. I can often cure the condition by cycling the system through standby and wake up, using the Mosaic ACTUS app or the dial interface; once or twice I also had to turn it off and on, because one cycle through standby / wake up didn’t do the trick.
I am using DSDx8 upsampling. I wonder if this is pushing the system too much, resulting in the problem above? Initially, DSDx8 would sometimes result in no audio or harsh noise from the speakers, but this problem seems to have disappeared (possibly with the current firmware upgrade, I am not sure about the timing). I changed the upsampling to DSDx4 yesterday, to see the impact on robustness.
I did check and re-insert the ACTUS cables in the back of the units and they seem to be connected well. Maybe I should try again.
In about one of 6 times, the user interface does not come up. The display remains dark or stuck with a message about coming up, although the audio plays just well. Pressing or holding the standby button on the bottom front of the user interface unit does not do anything: The unit needs to have the power turned off and on.
Andrej, these are probably not questions that forum members are likley to have answers to considering how new the product is and the limited number of current owners. Your issues need to be addressed to dCS support whom I am sure will be very interested in your feedback:
I, too, recently upgraded from Vivaldi to Varese, and I, too, have occasionally experienced the same soundstage “tilt” as you. Like you, I’ve been able to solve the problem by rebooting the system whenever it occurs.
It will be interesting to see what the dCS folks have to say about the matter.
As you are the second Varese owner to report this it is worthwhile ensuring that dCS are aware by also telling support as it indicates it is not a one-off occurrence. DCS personnel will stop by here from time to time but are not likely to read everything.
Thanks for flagging this up - we are aware of this issue and are working on a fix for it.
It seems to be affecting a very small number of systems and we have been working with the ones that have reported it to try to identify exactly what is causing the blank display and / or one DAC not coming out of standby correctly issues however @sali we are sure the DSDx8 upsampling isn’t a contributory factor though, the audio issue that you mention there and no longer get was resolved in a recent firmware update.
@Cleop and @sali - I’ll contact you both directly as I don’t seem to have had anything raised here for you and it would be great to get some information back from both of you if that’s OK?
My two cents on this: I would not recommend upsampling in this manner. I would recommend looking at the source material, and playing the file back in its original recorded format.
For example, if you are using NativeDSD, each file will say if the original recording was at DSD64, PCM192, DXD, DSD128, DSD256, etc. I would play back at that resolution.
For some reason I can’t see who posted the query that was then deleted from my phone - I’ll check from my PC when I get to that and try to chase it up …
I know that Pete is quite hot on this but can I leave a reminder on here that if you are having a problem then please do feel free to drop an email to [email protected] …
Yep, thanks, I’m aware of both of those and I’m in contact with both to try to get to the bottom of that issue … there was an additional query posted into the thread which was for a quite different issue but was later deleted which @Ermos had replied to whilst it was still visible.
I can see the contents of that query but I couldn’t see (from my phone) the details of who posted it so I could contact them…
As it is the poster has just contacted me via support@ so we’re in touch there too…
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