Amp v4 Will Not Play From Optical-In

I’ve been an Arylic customer for some years now, having spent upwards of $4,000 in equipment of theirs. I’ve always used the Amp v4 (used to be v3) for my projects, and while it’s always been confusing adding the SPDIF board (since the instruction manual does not mention the v4 at all, you just have to assume what should work based on what the most similar amp there are instructions for are), but by power of deduction, I’ve always figured it out.

Last month, I set a system up for a customer, a good 3 hours away from home. By the time we tried connecting his TV’s optical out into the SPDIF board, the amp did nothing. I noticed the LED kept flashing (instead of being solid magenta)… After about an hour worth of trying, embarrassed, I told my client I must have a faulty board or amplifier and I would return on the following day.
I grabbed a new amp, and a new SPDIF board (just in case either or both were faulty) and headed back to my client. Once there, I had to disassemble the stereo he bought from me, install the new amp and new spdif input board and to my surprise, nothing. Still nothing. I made sure, once again, just like the day before, that his TV was sending PCM, that it was not set to some weirdo format, and that there was nothing out of the ordinary. He even grabbed an old Sonos soundbar he was hoping to replace and showed me how that unit took the signal and was able to output sound immediately while my equipment was not able to. I told him I would figure it out and come back a third time.

Note this has already been almost 1,000 miles and over 12 hours of driving to get to this point.

Back at my shop, I bought myself a cd player (something with an optical out) to test. Sure enough, the Arylic Amp v4 along with the spdif input board simply do not recognize the signal, while other amps do.

I contacted support and they of course blame the user. Might I be sending signal in a format that the amp wouldn’t recognize. Should they send me a replacement amp since it sounds like mine is faulty… I explained I have at the time 8 amps and 9 spdif boards, and either they’re all faulty, of there’s something else going on.

A picture of the setup was not enough, they wanted a video. Got a video. They come back telling me that I’m installing it wrong, but after asking for guidance as to “how to install correctly”, I get ghosted.

Only after reminding the support team that I’ve sunk almost $4,000 USD in the last 8 months and was looking to expand my business this coming year, did they instead, ask me to send a new email out to someone else. I am getting tired of this and NEED to come up with a solution with my client. I am losing business and sleep over this.

I’m hoping someone here on the forums can help.

It is my understanding that the default setting of the SPDIF board is out. You can change this by using the ACPWorkbench tuning too.

Amp v4’s default is Optical-in; you’d need Workbench to switch it to Optical-out.

I have the same Amp 2.0 v4 and a SPDIF IN board. Because there are multiple cables included in the box I tried them all in hopes that I could maybe be done with only one 7 wire cable. Even though with a continuity check the pins seems to be the same in the different connectors on the SPDIF board then what ended up working was the setup as explained in the SPDIF manual. You need 2 cables, one for the SPDIF and GND and the other for power. I pulled some wires from a 7 pin connector, which I plugged into the amp header to get 3.3v and GND and connected the other end to the 5v input of the SPDIF board. SPIDF 2 pin cable went directly from the amp 2 pin socket to the boards 2 pin socket. The only way it worked for me.