I have a blu-ray player connected to the BD Coax connection of the SA30. When playing music I get a lot of drop-outs. It can sometimes have an interval of 10 minutes, sometimes several drop-outs within a minute. I’ve already changed coax-cables and blu-ray players. The dropouts are still there. Can this be a hardware issue (the BD Coax connection being faulty)? My CDS50 is connected to the other AV Coax connection of the SA30: no problems at all. Using the same type QED Performance Coax cable.
1 Like
Have you updated to latest firmware from Arcam website, or are you still on 1.62/1027?
If still on 1.62, please update, and it should solve your issue.
Thanks Felix. Solving this with a firmware update sounds a bit strange to me though. One coax-connection doesn’t have problems, the other one does. This should be solved by firmware?
Yes. I know it sounds strange, but for a very long time there was some bug in DSP firmware, which caused strange issues. Drop-outs in digital inputs, distortion etc. Drop-outs depend on source device. The less clock drift it has, the less chance of drop-outs. For example at the beginning a lot of people were complaining about drop-outs on HDMI input, but mostly from Samsung and LG TV’s. I haven’t had any with Panasonic. At least that is/was our speculation here, on the forum. We are not sure about it though. All i know is that drop-outs been fixed (at least for most cases) with latest firmware.
Probably Arcam engineers could elaborate more on this, but we never got answer.
Anyway please try new firmware and it SHOULD fix this issue for you. Please report back.
1 Like
Thanks for your explanation. Later today or tomorrow I will try to install the latest firmware and will let you know whether it works or not.
1 Like
Hi Felix. I’ve updated the firmware (very easy to do by the way) and have been playing Steven Wilson’s BR-audio album The Future Bites for about one hour: not one drop-out so far! I have to be honest: I didn’t expect this 
As you obviously know a lot, maybe you have an answer to another post of mine too. This Steven Wilson BR-audio is 96khz. My Arcam shows 48khz. I use a Sony BR-player (exclusively for BR-audio) and it’s connected using coax to the SA30 (as you know by now I guess). I tried playing it using a computer-blu-ray-player and then the SA30 showed 96khz. I don’t understand. Have you got any clue?
Thanks for helping me out!
Glad it works now ok 
About your BR. Does it play any other disks with higher sampling rate?
In Setup->Audio of your player there is option:
[PCM Downsampling]: Set the sampling rate for PCM audio output when this player is connected through a digital connector (COAXIAL or OPTICAL).
What is set there currently?
These are the only options I have.
My BD-player is only used for audio using a coax connection. The little monitor is for being able to operate it. None of my other blu-rays shows 96khz. Like I mentioned before: I attached an old Popcorn Media player with a built-in PC-blu-ray player. That simple player showed 96khz on the SA30.
The blu-ray player I use is a Sony BDP-S6700 (using coax).
What options do you have under Digital Audio Output?
Only PCM or Auto. Tried both. Downmix has Stereo and Surround as options. For that simple PC blu-ray player I didn’t have to adjust anything. I put in the disc and it showed 96 immedeiately.
I found out someone mentioning on the Steve Hoffman forum that the coaxial output is obviously limited to 24/48. I don’t know if this makes much difference in sound quality/experience?
You mean output of the BD player? Strange, but might be the case.
I would say it doesn’t make a big difference. Probably sounds better than using analogue connection anyway, especially that if you want to use DL in SA30, it means that signal would go through DAC of the BD player, than ADC, DSP and DAC of SA30.
Yes, output of the BD-player. What do you mean by DL in this context?
Dirac Live. If you don’t use DL, signal has to go via DSP and DAC of the amp. If you provide analogue signal, it additionally goes via ADC.
But if you’re not using DL, you can use analogue connection and analogue direct mode.