What does the “Error F” on the Cascade Director display mean?
This week I did a lot of equipment rearrangement, which involved pulling out the power from the Cascade Director, and unplugging the cables for the Director. The Power Base and DAC were not touched.
The Analog 1 and 2 input are working, I used them for my phono preamp and surround system.
If I use Roon to send a stream via network to the Renderer, the Render reacts to it partially. The speed appears, but the bit width does not., After about 15 seconds like this the display shows Error F. When this happens then the only to restart Cascade is to unplug it, wait, then plug it back in.
If I use the USB output of Roon, via Fiber/Pro USB, nothing happens at all.
I thought possibly the fiber cable between the DAC and the Director might have been damaged. To test this out I replaced that cable with the one I used for ProUSB. Of course now ProUSB won’t work. But that did not fix the problem.
Error F means frame error. This is mostly likely a problem with the fiber connection between the Digital Director and the DAC. I would double-check the fiber connection. If it looks alright, swap the SFP fiber modules and try the ones from your ProUSB/ProISL input. The SFP modules are easy to remove. Simply pull the blue removal tab down and pull straight out.
It turns out it was not the SFP module. In the process of swapping the SFP modules in the Director I rechecked the fiber connection to the DAC. It made a faint click when I pushed in on it, so it may have been unseated.
But then it occurred to me that the AC power was off to all the equipment while things were being rearranged and I saw that the DAC pilot light was red. So I turned on the DAC and things started working.
So most probably the problem was operator malfunction
