SOMETHING WE FIXED TODAY, AND IT HAS BOTHERED PEOPLE FOR YEARS
If you play high resolution or DSD material to a network streamer, you may know this one. Let an album run from start to finish and everything is perfect. But skip to another track in the middle of a song, and the next one arrives with a burst of noise, or a brief stumble before it settles. It only happens when you press Next.
Most people assumed this was simply how streamers and DACs behave with high bandwidth formats. We assumed it too, for a long time. It has been reported for years, on different apps and different hardware, and the usual conclusion is that it is a limitation you learn to live with.
It turns out it can be solved from the app.
We spent a days on it. Not guessing, measuring: proving what it was not, one candidate at a time, until only one explanation was left standing. The answer came from an unexpected direction, and once we understood it the fix was clear.
From today, in Serento:
Skipping tracks on DSD is silent.
The same fix covers everything above CD quality.
Albums played straight through were always clean, and are untouched.
CD quality material behaves exactly as it always has.
There is one trade-off, and we would rather you hear it from us than discover it and wonder. On high resolution and DSD material, the music now begins a moment after you press Next, instead of instantly. That short wait is deliberate, not a delay we failed to remove. We tested it at several lengths and settled on the shortest one that keeps every track change completely clean. Standard resolution material is unaffected and still starts immediately.
Nothing about the audio itself has changed. No conversion, no resampling, no processing of any kind, and no compromise anywhere in the signal path. The bits that reach your DAC are the same bits as before. They simply arrive in a way it can handle.
If you own a streamer and this has quietly annoyed you for years, it is worth putting an album on and pressing Next a few times.