Some music "skips" during playback

Hey all -

I went to my buddies house last night. I took a memory stick with 6 to 7 titles (all multi-channel). He has an OPPO 93, so we plug the stick in and go from there. About half of the titles skip every 5-6 seconds. Doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason. It's not related to the sample rate because some of the 96/24 titles play just fine, others skip.

On my system, none of them skip - though I'm playing via Foobar, not my Oppo.
Anyone know why this would be?

GOS said:

Hey all -

I went to my buddies house last night. I took a memory stick with 6 to 7 titles (all multi-channel). He has an OPPO 93, so we plug the stick in and go from there. About half of the titles skip every 5-6 seconds. Doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason. It's not related to the sample rate because some of the 96/24 titles play just fine, others skip.

On my system, none of them skip - though I'm playing via Foobar, not my Oppo.
Anyone know why this would be?

Click to expand...

Interesting...

Once in a while my Oppo 103 skips briefly playing DSD MCH from an external Toshiba HD. I haven't investigated except to determine it is not always the same track or location within a track. It's infrequent enough so I just live with it. I suspect it may be related to Oppo power supply stability and the vagarities of the physical disc, but have no evidence.

Your situation sounds different. Perhaps a combination of memory stick read times, CPU bandwidth, and decoder?

The only random skipping I have ever had on my Oppo 105 is when I have both HDMI outputs (1 & 2) connected. If I disconnect the HDMI 1 output the skipping stops.

wavelength said:

The only random skipping I have ever had on my Oppo 105 is when I have both HDMI outputs (1 & 2) connected. If I disconnect the HDMI 1 output the skipping stops.

Click to expand...

Wow, that's odd. I dunno what my friend has connected. Whoops - he has the 93 and I wouldn't think it has 2 HDMI outputs. So, is it likely due to the memory stick? Never thought about trying a different one.

If I'm listening to an album and I switch the TV to select the output from the amp so I can see the tracklisting etc. I lose sound for a second or two. It does it for CDs as well, so it has something to do with the HDMI standard and how it is dealt with by the amp, rather than down to the source. The HDMI link between the TV & Amp auto-negotiates the link type/speeds/formats etc, and that kills the sound (as the interface must do an update as a result). I don't have an Oppo but one of my Blu-ray players has two HDMI ports, 1 is the master with full audio/visual, port 2 is labelled as secondary and is a slave of port 1. So I wonder if your issue is similar in that for some reason link negotiations are happening on the main link causing the 'skip', whereas link 2 just outputs.

wavelength said:

The only random skipping I have ever had on my Oppo 105 is when I have both HDMI outputs (1 & 2) connected. If I disconnect the HDMI 1 output the skipping stops.

Click to expand...

Read errors from the USB Memory stick is one possibility and so a re-try of the block of data is initiated (it happens over Ethernet a lot, and when listening to internet radio), so the Oppo runs out of data to play and 'jumps'. FLASH memory can have bad sectors and bits - just like hard drives. The other one I have seen is with FLAC files where my player doesn't like something in the FLAC file format (can be data errors as well) and just stops, yet the file plays on my PC.

GOS said:

Hey all -

I went to my buddies house last night. I took a memory stick with 6 to 7 titles (all multi-channel). He has an OPPO 93, so we plug the stick in and go from there. About half of the titles skip every 5-6 seconds. Doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason. It's not related to the sample rate because some of the 96/24 titles play just fine, others skip.

On my system, none of them skip - though I'm playing via Foobar, not my Oppo.
Anyone know why this would be?

Click to expand...

GOS said:

Wow, that's odd. I dunno what my friend has connected. Whoops - he has the 93 and I wouldn't think it has 2 HDMI outputs. So, is it likely due to the memory stick? Never thought about trying a different one.

Click to expand...

I've read where usb memory sticks don't have a fast enough transfer rate for hi-res files. Maybe that is causing some skipping.

DuncanS said:

If I'm listening to an album and I switch the TV to select the output from the amp so I can see the tracklisting etc. I lose sound for a second or two. It does it for CDs as well, so it has something to do with the HDMI standard and how it is dealt with by the amp, rather than down to the source. The HDMI link between the TV & Amp auto-negotiates the link type/speeds/formats etc, and that kills the sound (as the interface must do an update as a result). I don't have an Oppo but one of my Blu-ray players has two HDMI ports, 1 is the master with full audio/visual, port 2 is labelled as secondary and is a slave of port 1. So I wonder if your issue is similar in that for some reason link negotiations are happening on the main link causing the 'skip', whereas link 2 just outputs.

Click to expand...

Exactly. My setup is even simpler. My HDMI outputs are connected directly to TVs. My amps only have analog inputs. So in my scenario the the analog playback is being affected by the HDMI connection to the TV. Apologies to GOS for diverting this thread.

wavelength said:

I've read where usb memory sticks don't have a fast enough transfer rate for hi-res files. Maybe that is causing some skipping.

Click to expand...

Yeah, I wonder. Odd thing is it's only certain titles, and all titles on the stick happen to be 96/24....except for the DSD of I Robot.

GOS said:

Yeah, I wonder. Odd thing is it's only certain titles, and all titles on the stick happen to be 96/24....except for the DSD of I Robot.

Click to expand...

I've also read that the bigger the stick the slower the transfer speeds. Somebody said don't use a stick bigger than 32GB.