Dragonfly freezes Windows 8.1. SOLVED!

My good buddy, Jeffo, warned me about crawling into the rabbit hole that is espresso coffee. At first you think, Ill get a machine and have great coffee. No. You need a grinder... A convex tamper... The grind has to be just right... The temperature can't be too hot... Or too cold. There is an infinite number of ways to tweak the variables when attempting to get the best cup of coffee.

These Klipsch S3's are the BOMB! As earbuds go they have amazing sound and block out 95% of external noise. I wear them when working and can hear podcasts really nicely over top of the saws and other power tools. Also, Klipsch has amazing customer service. They've sent me 2 replacement sets, no questions asked,  when I ripped the wires apart by catching them on various jobsite hazards.

There is another thing that is similar in the depth of the hole in which one can fall down: music reproduction. I like and appreciate great sounding music. Crappy sounding music drives me crazy. MP3's through an ipod, even with a nice set of earbuds just don't have the same appeal as sitting in front of nice speakers, driven by a great amp.

For my birthday Rachelle gave me a killer pair of headphones, the AKG Q701s. When I sat down with them plugged into my Yamaha amp I was astounded! When plugged into the computer, however, they really highlight the problems with MP3 compression and the horrible Digital Analogue Converters in almost every computer. The solution was to spend some cash on a good digital-analogue converter. The bang-for-your-buck choice is the
Audioquest Dragonfly, a USB DAC for a reasonable price and great sound. When paired with the Hifiman EF5 headphone amp that I got as a hand-me-down (one of the best ever) from  John McLachlan, it delivers an amazing sound that is as nice as what the Yamaha amp can put out. This is assuming that you're using MP3's with  low or no loss compression and a high sample rate.

OK, so you can see that I'm well on my way down the rabbit hole and heading to someplace really warm. I was really please with this setup until Microsoft pushed out Windows 8.1. All of a sudden, the computer started freezing every 5-10 minutes and was unresponsive. I traced the problem to audio or video, narrowed it to audio, then hit on the Dragonfly as the culprit. As it turns out, I had plugged the Dragonfly into a powered USB hub. THis setup worked fine for Windows 8, but failed miserably on 8.1. The solution was to move it to a direct USB port and all is well again here in the rabbit hole.