Asus D2 - Optical suddenly stopped working

[Nazo]

Ok, so I have an Asus D2 which as anyone who has used one probably already knows has pretty sucky drivers that haven't been updated in ages. So I've been using the UNi Xonar drivers for some time. These seem to work just great and for ages I've had no real troubles beyond the crappy EAX implementation Asus thought was a good idea. However, quite a bit ago now the optical connection just suddenly stopped outputting actual audio as far as I can determine. It has been too long for me to remember specifics, but as far as I can recall at the time I had not changed anything. No new drivers, changed settings, or so on. Anyway, I've tried clean reinstallations and messing with just about every setting even remotely related to the digital output and nothing I do can get the optical working. It's worth noting here that I do have the red light, just I'm getting silence from the receiver is all.

Unfortunately, my DAC in this case is just a really simple Fiio D3, so it's not going to tell me anything specific about the connection, just whether or not there is one. The cable is good and the Fiio D3 is good (it works fine with my PS2, PS3, and TV so long as they are, of course, set to output only raw PCM audio and nothing encoded.) The really funny thing is, the coaxial works. Unfortunately, for whatever reason the coaxial connection keeps doing stuff like producing horribly loud and physically painful pops when I change or start tracks in my audio player no matter what settings I try, though setting it to fade in/out slightly seems to decrease it considerably. (After much googling around, my belief is that this is basically the soundcard trying to use less power and essentially cutting off the connection when not actually in use. Whereas the optical connection at least has the very basic minimum signal with the light always on, I think the coaxial doesn't necessarily stay always on in the same manner. In the thread I initially found, they basically were adjusting the length of time before it would enter power saving mode, which I tried, but it didn't help -- which kind of makes sense given that we're talking about just a few milliseconds between tracks at the most... Either way, the optical didn't do it and the coaxial does.)

I've already tried uninstalling the drivers, running a driver cleaner (including their basic batch file from their FAQ section,) and that sort of thing as well and it didn't do any good. At this point I'm just completely stumped. There is no reason I can see for the optical to not work, it just simply doesn't.

 

[Meeho]

You probably have, but just to be sure, have you checked Control Panel>Sound>Playback and in the Xonar properties tried with 44.1 and 48 kHz output? Tried a different PCI port?

Can you test the card in another computer?

 

[Nazo]

Er, it's not the PCI port. Not sure where that came from, lol. There's only one real slot where I can properly use it anyway though (actually, I forget, this board may only have one PCI port anyway -- eventually I'll have to go PCI-E, but I really don't want to have to change my soundcard any time soon as this is actually a quite decent one once you turn off all extra processing like "GX.")

And yes, I've tried different output frequencies. I've also set Foobar2000 to resample to the same frequency so there should be no sample rate changes between things.

I played around some more with settings and with the right output and a 100ms fade in/out on each setting it no longer does the horrible pop when changing tracks normally (except every once in a while when I manually change just to screw with me.) It still does it after stopping and starting a new track.

Oh, and it should go without saying, but the popping isn't present in the sound normally. Besides the fact that it didn't do it on optical, it also doesn't output the popping in the analog output. (The Fiio D3 feeds a headphone amplifier separately and the analog output goes to a small speaker, so I've listened through the speaker plenty in the past and never had that noise on it.)

 

[Nazo]

So if anyone was watching this or should happen across it in the future, it turns out it was the cable. I tested it on something else the first time, but I guess it must have just been on the way out and just bending it a certain way was enough or something because it must have just worn out or something. I tested it again on other things and it didn't work this time around. I switched out the cable and once again have a proper optical connection. Apparently it really was just that simple. What was really annoying is the old one still actually has an obvious light coming through and everything (and of course I tried cleaning the tips.) There's no way to tell it apart from a fully working one.