I replaced my CPU recently, giving the newer one built by my brother and brought my HP media center out from storage.
Old Set-up: PC's on-board sound card > Ixos Optical cable > DAC-AH > custom AU24 cables > Little Dot MkII Headphone Amp > Grado SR225 / AKG K66
New Set-up: HP on-board sound card > Coaxial cable* > DAC-AH > custom AU24 cables > Little Dot MkII Headphone Amp > Grado SR225 / AKG K66
Now I'm getting funky gain settings from the digital out. In the middle of a song, there will be a long passage with the electric guitars, bass, drums and a string quintet playing, plus a choir, and at one point either the guitar or the orchestra starts losing volume. On another passage, which is a quiet one with just the violin on the ambient and the bass handling the beat, the latter sounds "in-your-face" as it should on a Grado, then near the end starts tolose volume, then when all the other instruments go back in, it's too loud so I decrease teh volume. Towards the end of the song, it shouldn't be fading out, but it was, and when the next track started, I had to turn the amp volume knob back to 10:00. On the old PC, I just had it at 8:00 and only moved it when I play some albums that were recorded at higher gain.
Funny part is, when the volume from the music is low, it doesn't affect the volume of Windows sound effects.
What's happening here? Is it a software issue?
*Given my table's still a mess of cables I decided to not use my fragile 47Labs coax and use two others that I had lying around, customs out of pro-grade 75ohm cables terminated with RCA plugs. The one with a Quantum cable had loose plugs on it so I switched to the other one made by Audiophile for me, and it had the same issue. Used the first one with my Marantz CDP as source and it didn't have any problems.
