Schiit, interesting name...more interesting products!

wisnon

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Dec 12, 2011
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Have heard the Yggy many many times and love it, I have the Gumby which is a tad warmer sounding. To me, they sound a lot like live music. Recordings of jazz in clubs or classical in large spaces really shine as the sense of space is remarkable. They are very detailed. Some may find them to be too analytical. I don't at all and find some DACs to be two sweet or euphoric which may be good for systems or rooms which stray too far from neutral, i.e., too bright. To each his own. As for the company name, I love it! If you want native DSD or MQA, forget it as Schiit will support neither. At least, with MQA you will be able to get most of the way there with software deciding, even without a MQA DAC. Eventually, full decoding will be available via software I am sure,

I agree about the name. WRT DSD, its a must have for me.

I found the Yggy too dry....and as such lacking "soul"...but perhaps it was the ultra neutral system that we both know. How are you anyway? It has been a while...I was just in London, your fav City and your team Chelsea is still leading the Premiership.
 

FrantzM

Member Sponsor & WBF Founding Member
Apr 20, 2010
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I applaud Schiit for their efforts and unconventional name.

I think they face an uphill battle with that name ... and their sane pricing. Once it is settled that they're not expensive they suddenly find themselves relegated to the "good for its price" damning faint praise or classified as "mid-fi" before one note has been played.
 

Al M.

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I think they face an uphill battle with that name

Not with me. In fact, I find it attractive for obvious reasons ;) .

... and their sane pricing. Once it is settled that they're not expensive they suddenly find themselves relegated to the "good for its price" damning faint praise or classified as "mid-fi" before one note has been played.

Not with me on this one either. My $ 3K speakers lift high above their price range, so I am always interested in audio bargains. Why should I pay more than necessary? Just because of some fancy brand? I pay for performance, not prestige. I am interested in a dCS Rossini DAC for timbral believability and resolution, not for being a dCS Rossini. If a Schiit (gotta love this) Yggdrasil could come close for a fraction of the price, then that's all I am interested in. I have my doubts, but it might be worth a try. A 5 % restocking fee of 115 bucks after a two-week trial period doesn't seem too bad.
 

Joe Whip

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Feb 8, 2014
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I agree about the name. WRT DSD, its a must have for me.

I found the Yggy too dry....and as such lacking "soul"...but perhaps it was the ultra neutral system that we both know. How are you anyway? It has been a while...I was just in London, your fav City and your team Chelsea is still leading the Premiership.

Hi Norman, I will be back in London in April after spending all of March in Australia and New Zealand. The blues are doing well as is Tottenham. The Gumby is warmer than the Yggy. Different strokes for different folks.
 

Joe Whip

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Feb 8, 2014
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I applaud Schiit for their efforts and unconventional name.

I think they face an uphill battle with that name ... and their sane pricing. Once it is settled that they're not expensive they suddenly find themselves relegated to the "good for its price" damning faint praise or classified as "mid-fi" before one note has been played.

Mike and Jason are selling to the younger crowd not your typical audiophile. They are doing very well.
 

wisnon

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Dec 12, 2011
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I applaud Schiit for their efforts and unconventional name.

I think they face an uphill battle with that name ... and their sane pricing. Once it is settled that they're not expensive they suddenly find themselves relegated to the "good for its price" damning faint praise or classified as "mid-fi" before one note has been played.
I do like their pricing and attitude. Just didnt like the Yggy.
 

wisnon

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Dec 12, 2011
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Hi Norman, I will be back in London in April after spending all of March in Australia and New Zealand. The blues are doing well as is Tottenham. The Gumby is warmer than the Yggy. Different strokes for different folks.

Man U has the momentum though, but Chelsea and L'Pool dont have Euro duty, so will be very well rested. There is talk of an internal 6 team mini-league in the title race this year.

Man C is star studded, but fragile defence while Spurs have 2 killer fwds.

My team is 'Pool, but they have the lowest number of "brand name" players.
 

Joe Whip

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Feb 8, 2014
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Saw Liverpool Lose to West Ham at Upton Park Jan. 2016. Klopp has quite a set of lungs, you could hear him quite clearly up where I was. Liverpool is short on defenders and a keeper. Man U will be a factor next year for sure but can't catch the Blues this year.
 

Al M.

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Mike and Jason are selling to the younger crowd not your typical audiophile. They are doing very well.

I must be young then ;).
 

Johnny Vinyl

Member Sponsor & WBF Founding Member
May 16, 2010
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I think it's a fabulous name. It shows a sense of humour in an otherwise somewhat stodgy audio world. Members on most audio boards seem to have had good experiences with them and they are thereby gaining some traction. It's companies like Schiit who offer solid products at reasonable entry-level pricepoints that have the opportunity to get more people interested in this hobby. Today's entry-level audiophile is tomorrow high-end buyer.
 

wisnon

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Dec 12, 2011
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Saw Liverpool Lose to West Ham at Upton Park Jan. 2016. Klopp has quite a set of lungs, you could hear him quite clearly up where I was. Liverpool is short on defenders and a keeper. Man U will be a factor next year for sure but can't catch the Blues this year.

You ARE on top of things!
 

Al M.

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It is worth noting that Mike Moffat, one of the two company owners, is of Theta Digital fame.

Here is an interesting technical bit from the Computer Audiophile review of the Yggdrasil DAC:

Two more items I want to touch on are the filtering and hardware components inside the Yggdrasil. Again, these items individually don't mean a thing (if the designer ain't got that swing). Schiit Audio uses its own closed-form filter that's hallmark is using the original samples, not throwing the original samples away while upsampling like most DACs. Good, bad, or indifferent, this is Schiit's way of filtering. Schiit says it doesn't do guess work because it keeps the original samples. On the CA forum, Mike Moffat elaborated further by saying,

"It is a digital filter/sample rate converter designed to convert all audio to 352.8 or 384KHz sample rates so that it may drive our DACs. You get it uniquely from us; it is our filter. It took five people many years to design and perfect at the dawn of digital playback, way back in the early eighties. It keeps all original samples; those samples contain frequency and phase information which can be optimized not only in the time domain but in the frequency domain. We do precisely this; the mechanic is we add 7 new optimized samples between the original ones. All digital filters multiply the original audio signal by a series of coefficients which are calculated by a digital filter generator. Over the years, before Theta Digital was born (my original company), we developed this filter design/generator. The common digital filter method is a Parks-McClellan algorithm, which has been used in all of the older oversampling chipsets, and persists to this day as the input filter in most Delta-Sigma DACs. Why? I assume it is because it is royalty-free, and the algorithm is widely available as are digital filter software design packages to aid in a cookbook approach to the design. Now Parks McClellan an open form math solution, which means that the coefficient calculation is a series of approximations which always get halfway there. This of course, means it never completely solves. The worse news is that all original sample are lost, replaced by 8 new approximated ones. Further, the Parks McClellan optimization is based on the frequency domain only – flat frequency response, with the time (read spatial) domain ignored. Our filter is based upon closed form math – the coefficients are not approximations, the equations solve; the matrices invert and the math is done. The filter also optimizes the time domain."

In addition to Schiit's unique filter, the company uses unique hardware (at least in the audio world) in the Yggdrasil. Schiit uses four of the Analog Devices AD5791BRUZ DACs that are typically used in MRI imaging and military weapons. These DACs aren't trivial to implement in a digital to analog converter. I've heard many engineers in the industry suggest that the newest Sigma-Delta chips can be implemented much easier than a multibit design and that it doesn't take much to get a Sigma-Delta DAC up and running. It certainly takes quite a bit to get a Sigma-Delta to sound as good as possible, but nonetheless Schiit's selection of the AD5791 DAC has made its job significantly more difficult. In other words, not every engineer is capable of implementing the AD5791 in a great sounding audio component.

The review also has a cool picture of the circuit board.
 

16hz lover

Well-Known Member
Aug 2, 2013
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Still the worst name for a company in history. I'll never buy their product because of it, no matter how you pronounce it.:(
 

Al M.

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Still the worst name for a company in history. I'll never buy their product because of it, no matter how you pronounce it.:(

Really? I just love their twisted sense of humor.
 

ack

VIP/Donor & WBF Founding Member
May 6, 2010
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Really? I just love their twisted sense of humor.

Love it too; in the same twisted sense of humor, one might say the name represents an embodiment of a concept in the design.
 

LL21

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Dec 26, 2010
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It is worth noting that Mike Moffat, one of the two company owners, is of Theta Digital fame.

Here is an interesting technical bit from the Computer Audiophile review of the Yggdrasil DAC:


FROM MIKE MOFFAT (FORMERLY THETA DIGITAL):

"...The common digital filter method is a Parks-McClellan algorithm, which has been used in all of the older oversampling chipsets, and persists to this day as the input filter in most Delta-Sigma DACs. Why? I assume it is because it is royalty-free, and the algorithm is widely available as are digital filter software design packages to aid in a cookbook approach to the design. Now Parks McClellan an open form math solution, which means that the coefficient calculation is a series of approximations which always get halfway there. This of course, means it never completely solves. The worse news is that all original sample are lost, replaced by 8 new approximated ones. Further, the Parks McClellan optimization is based on the frequency domain only – flat frequency response, with the time (read spatial) domain ignored. Our filter is based upon closed form math – the coefficients are not approximations, the equations solve; the matrices invert and the math is done. The filter also optimizes the time domain."

the interesting thing is:

1. his explanation of the open source math being uses in SD...vs his closed (ie solved not approximated on the original samples). Certainly sounds like his method is more definitive which should be an excellent start.

2. obviously, there is a lot more to the final product than just the math (power, vibration, analog output, etc)

Just curious if any of the techies here find merit in what Mike Moffat is saying about S-D chips and what happens mathematically inside them?
 

opus112

Well-Known Member
Feb 24, 2016
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Just curious if any of the techies here find merit in what Mike Moffat is saying about S-D chips and what happens mathematically inside them?

I'm broadly in agreement with what Mike M says about S-D chips and share his passion for the sound of multibit (or R2R as some call it). But I'm not against S-D in principle I think its a matter of implementation details to get it sounding right.

What he's saying about Parks McClellan though is pretty misleading. Its true it 'never solves' but then no digital filter design software ever perfectly solves the filter design because the result is an array of integers not real numbers. So I remain dubious about the advantages claimed for what's sometimes called his 'mega-burrito' filter but the products overall rock.
 

LL21

Well-Known Member
Dec 26, 2010
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I'm broadly in agreement with what Mike M says about S-D chips and share his passion for the sound of multibit (or R2R as some call it). But I'm not against S-D in principle I think its a matter of implementation details to get it sounding right.

What he's saying about Parks McClellan though is pretty misleading. Its true it 'never solves' but then no digital filter design software ever perfectly solves the filter design because the result is an array of integers not real numbers. So I remain dubious about the advantages claimed for what's sometimes called his 'mega-burrito' filter but the products overall rock.

Great stuff, Opus. Thank you. In other words, in a dumb-non techie interpretation...Trigonometry was always an approximation of the area under a parabolic curve by taking smaller and smaller slices of areas under the curve and adding it up. And along comes Sir Isaac Newton who, through discovering Calculus, realizes through a higher level math that you can actually calculate EXACTLY what the area is under the parabola, etc.

In a non-techie way, why can't chips use their own form of 'calculus' to get a perfect match to the original signal?
 

opus112

Well-Known Member
Feb 24, 2016
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Zhejiang
In a non-techie way, why can't chips use their own form of 'calculus' to get a perfect match to the original signal?

Ha great question Lloyd, I'm not sure there's any point because the original signal got small bits trimmed off it when it was digitized. Dither smooths over that truncation but information is almost always lost unless the signal had a high noise floor to begin with. So all we have to work with in digital is the 16bits coming from the front-end ADC. Digital is always going to be an approximation, calculus assumes the use of real numbers but digital is limited to integers (even when floating point is used the mantissa's still an integer, 24bits for single, 48 for double never a real). We can of course extend the precision as far as we want (or can afford) but integers will never attain the precision achievable with reals, just forever approach closer and closer.
 

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