Vanity 203HD Dolby TrueHD DTS-MA

Hopefully somebody still reads this forum... I bought a Vanity 203HD board a few years ago to 'future-proof' my Oppo UDP-203. Now I finally have a reason to use it. Installation went smoothly but I encountered a few hiccups:

- With a Benchmark DAC3 HGC, DoP loses sync frequently resulting in dropouts or static. Are there any settings I can change to fix this?

- DTS-MA and TrueHD 24/192 are not sent over the SPDIF output, I only get 24/48. Is this normal?


Thanks in advance!

Hi yage,
Yeah, the forum is still active! :-)
- Try to find a setting in your DAC to relax the ESS loop filter bandwidth (DPLL). With some DACs based on the ESS parts the tiny frequency adjustments on Vanity's digital clock recovery system may cause momentary "unlocks" of the incoming signal due to too strict DPLL setting of the ESS part. The best to confirm the root cause of the glitches is to look at the Vanity board during operation and see if the LEDs indicating the frequency adjustment correspond to the sync issues.

- This might be OPPO's settings. To be honest I don't have much experience with those two formats if and how they would be decoded and played by the OPPO, but if everything is setup correctly and there is no restriction (from the HDMI subsystem for example) you should get 192/24.

Regards,
Pavel

Thanks for the reply! I’ll have a look at the LEDs next time I get the chance. Just to confirm - they should flash together if there is clock adjustment, right? In the meantime the DSD to PCM conversion sounds really good already. Nice work!

I did a little more research into the TrueHD and DTS-MA and I think that HDCP prevents the full 24/192 soundtrack from being output. Not too big of a deal since most of the movie watching is done over streaming anyway these days and limited to 24/48.

Hi yage,
Correct about the LEDs, when they flash simultaneously as the clocks are being adjusted.
HDCP on downstream HDMI can surely be the reason for the OPPO refusing to play 192/24. Try to play the DTS disc with no HDMI device connected to the OPPO and see. You can use the mobile app to control the player if there is no screen connected.
Regards,
Pavel

@yage, this may simply be a function of the movie soundtracks that you are playing through the player are encoded to disc at 24/48. That's how all of mine have been on the Vanity103 and appears to be the case with the vast majority of movie encodes to disc. There may be exceptions for some discs, but they seem to be pretty rare. If you try something that was actually encoded to disc 24/96 or higher you would be able to confirm. Music Blu-ray discs will often do this (the last Beatles - Abbey Road remaster for example).

It has nothing to do with audio processing settings, though of course you would want to make sure those are set correctly. I use a stereo system with my Oppo+Vanity, so use stereo downmix for example.