If you have the HA-2 SE like I do, then you probably love the sound quality too, like I do. I’ve been using it for about 3 years now, after I’ve upgraded from a Fiio E-10K, and so far so good.
But as much as I love it, I’m growing annoyed by how the firmware is programmed to cut off the sound precisely 36 seconds after any sound playback stops. It does this in order to preserve battery life, and resumes the sound as soon as playback starts again (albeit with a ~2-3 sec delay, which translates into a “silent gap”).
If you’re out and about, this sounds like a pretty clever way to extend battery life, so I have nothing against it. The problem is that it does it all the time, even when the DAC is used with a desktop computer, and connected to power via USB, which is where this little trick stops making any sense, and starts getting real annoying.
They are offering a Windows 10 driver with the unit, and it even has an application that resides in the taskbar, which implies that they meant it as a versatile solution, for portable and desktop audio.
So when I use it at my computer, I find myself constantly having to rewind a YouTube video because my DAC was silent for a few minutes, and now I’m missing the first 2-3 seconds of sound playback while my HA-2 SE is resuming sound to me.
It would be logical (I think) that if the USB cable is plugged in the unit and it’s getting power through it, then the auto-off setting should be disabled, because there is no need to preserve battery life, but for some reason Oppo left it active at all times, and so the DAC goes to sleep even on continuous power. This was never mentioned in any review, on any website, including the Z review on the non-SE version of the HA-2 (which I’m guessing performs the same). Pretty important thing to know, in hindsight.
I’ve been putting up with this for the past 3 yrs or so (LOL) but lately it’s starting to kind of get to me, given that my previous E10-K however budget it was, didn’t have this problem. The only solution I could think of was to have a secondary media player always open in the task bar, and always playing a 100% silent track in a loop, so that way the DAC thinks there’s always playback, and never goes to sleep.
It’s actually working pretty well, and gets the intended effect, but the problem is that I accidentally pause the silent track at times, by trying to control my Tidal playback, because of how Windows controls the player that is “in focus” when you use media controls.
So my question is, has anyone found any way to circumvent this auto-sleep thing on the HA-2 SE? Of course, it would be easily fixable with a firmware update from Oppo, but it does not seem they have any interest in doing that.