888|24 clips at or near 0 dB Full Scale!

[Corey Shay]

I've had my 888|24 for about a month now and soon after I received it, I noticed that it seemed to distort when playing material through the Waves L1 or Maxim. I heard it on some retail CD's as well. The only way to alleviate the problem was to reduce the output of my mixes by about 1 dB.

I also tried playing sinewaves and they seemed to always break up (audibly) when the output level exceeded -1 dBFS. I admit it could have been my mixer (Mackie 1202 VLZ Pro), but I had nothing else to play it through. So I recalibrated the outputs by reducing them all by -4 dB so that it's now set to -14. The problem seems to have been alleviated.

By the way, when recalibrating I noticed that often one output would be off from another by as much as 1 dB. I was surprised at this because I've only had the unit (new) for a month and Digi does calibrate the levels beforehand.

Has anyone else experienced these problems? Why whould a high quality D/A distort after conversion?