Yggdrasil MIB was: Jason+Marv Pyrate Edition 11001B

Fair, but I’m not people i have a certificate.
Seriously though i get why they wouldn’t do it in general but i feel confident in my abilities and maybe they could make an exception.

 

Yeah @purr1n the problem with a lot of conversion is the death of separation whether from analog or loopback. And electronics designers who are deaf and think a jrc4580 and knockoff capacitors won’t make a sound difference. Or Topping’s knock off opamps. An rme is some monaural shit compared to real schiit. The og Yggdrasil didn’t have the separation but now everyone with 1500-2000 bucks can get huge sound. If you pay Apogee and know how to operate a digital mixer, you can get it something in slightly bigger than a modi. The half rack older Lavry and Lynx units are twice the size.

right now the biggest improvement for the pro guys is the surviving chip manufacturers making lower power converter ics and opamps with the same or better performance that they can cram into multichannel converters whose signal path are better than any console ever made at this point and makes prosumer garbage sound like a piece of shit. We’re finally seeing the NE5532 and NE5534 with their need for crazy coupling and high power consumption go away in good converters. They’re left in dinosaur gear. Not even SSL really uses them anymore because they make prosumer crap in China and just lie that it’s E or G series sound.

Multichannel converters used to suck ass.
Now Apogee and Lynx can cram 32 channels of good stuff into a couple of rack units. Metric Halo and Dangerous can do 8 channels in one box with no sonic degradation. Burl can be as brown or bright as you want in 2 rack units. The Chinese OEM made crap can’t compete with them or high end, western made stereo converters like Schiit makes in a variety of everchanging flavors or Lavry and Bricasti sell to oil sheikhs.

A lot of guitars are not bright. The speaker cones roll off, the communist tubes have no high end, and the recordings are low passed anyway for noise issues. Then they boost around 1.5 khz ish for clarity or 3 khz ish for presence and try to fit all the different players and tracks together with the vocals.

 

i think you can have the infamous schiit grey haze w tremendous clarity. both the Yggdrasil a1 and gungnir a1 (grey asf) prove this, imo.

 

got a problem w some good ol' comrades makin' triodes? ( :

also, if you know, did the GDR/DDR ever make tubes, too? or are they all soviet/eastern bloc?

 

Thanks for sharing the chart and further impressions, @purr1n. Some additional questions from me:

• The chart you shared seems to focus more on headphone usage, given the column related to headstage expansiveness. Do the same similarities and differences with the Yggdrasil variants hold true with speakers?
• Relatedly, I'm most concerned with losing one of my favorite things about the A2/OG: the dynamic, propulsive Moffat Bass™ that it produces when listening to speakers. How is MIL-B/MILF on that front?
• Which is more engaging out of A2/OG and MIL-B/MILF? Which gets your toes tapping, makes you more emotional, allows you to better connect with the singer/music? This is one of my favorite things about A2/OG, especially with rock/punk music.

And maybe one question for @schiit: Have you decided yet how the output stage will be handled for the new MIL variant? Will it be the same as it was with MIL, will you explore moving to a discrete/FET output stage with the new "B" chips similar to the one used in the A2/OG variant (given it seems the OG variant may be going away soon), or something new like a Nexus output stage?

 

“Grey haze” is a good term but I think it sounds too negative. So to illustrate what we seem to describe here, if you have access to a Jot 1 and a Jot 2, the Jot 1 has less of this haze (more blackground).

In DACs the ESSPro chips have less haze but a bit of shrilly highs (which some folks confuse with detail*), whereas an Yggdrasil OG has detail and a more natural reproduction, but a little bit of that not-super-blackground feel.

* similar to the Grado SR80 vs RS1, where the brightness on the 80 is giving you the illusion of detail, until you hear the 325 and above.

 

This actually makes me just want to keep OG. I absolutely love it with my speaker setup. For the HD600 i use now i think i’ll just be a heathen and use the zmf pads to smooth the treble and then drop it a bit with a high shelf.

 

ah, i was just tryna differentiate it from the haze i've heard from other DACs, schiit's is somehow grey, more like a cumulous cloud--but on the SFD-1 w UA module, there is a brown haze, or grit or dirt to the sound, like a sepia-toned fog...

i just felt like that was just a part of its tone, and also of its charm. Same w Schiit, I actually prefer YA1 & Gungnir A1 over their A2 variants, both of which, imo, had a bit of a blacker bg, and definitely to the LIM, which i didn't rly hear any greyness on at all.

 

@purr1n How close is the sound to a soekris dac? I feel like if it can maintain that same neutral tonality, but put just a bit of meat on the bones, and a bit more resolution and it sounds like a perfect dac to me.

the greyness in schiit A1/A2 were equally bad in blackground my opinion, which makes it always sound like you like listening to a studio tape or something. I exaggerate, but the sound never really felt "real" per se, with a sound of its own, which was enticing at first, pulling out a lot of microdetail, but becomes more and more apparent with a slight haze that becomes bothersome.

A1 was leaner and much more incisive, with clarity so it cut through the grey a lot more, wheras the A2, even with a blacker background, with its warmth, felt a bit bloated and slightly damped/blunt.

 

The dCS Bartok OTOH is super black, super clear, super precise, and… super sterile, almost uncanny valley for me. I think for me the smog you guys describe out of the Yggdrasil matches the distortion my brain considers normal (especially in instrumental pieces).

 

There are no Sabre highs on the current Apogee Symphonies. The lower fidelity MOTU AVB lineup did not have the Sabre highs either. They used the cheapest possible Sabre chip, the ES9016, with the channels split up for lower specs that didn't matter one bit in the real world compared to the perceived sound of the unit from its distortion characteristics and inputs that were noticeably warmer sounding than the outputs from literal analog junk in the signal path.

 

Yeah it's like music being mixed on NS10s from the mid 80s to the 2000s. They were at RadioShack. And color grading won't save bad movies. In no way could Oppenheimer be shot in a way that would make that script a good movie.

Yes unlike topping/ASR who pretend that the noise floor of a playback da converter matters that much when something is being mixed down from multitracks of real recordings in real rooms with 20-30 db hvac systems, safe gain staging, compressors, and tons of tracks. Most annoying noise is going to be gated away during silence, pushed down with expanders, or digitally removed if necessary in audio editor software.

 

I have an old Apogee Groove I've been using for years and years. Many different headphones and never once did it do anything sonically to piss me off. It's always been great though perhaps a tiny bit dark.

 

Thanks for the comparisons (and also someone did the spider graph, really helpful visualizing it). One thing that's probably hard to tell without listening to it. I went through A1, GS(with the firmware chip) and now LIM, I feel that the blackground + the timbre coherence from the LIM is something I really appreciate, but definitely missing a bit of the plankton compared to A1/GS.

One metaphor I use to compare the timbre coherence between A1/GS vs LIM was that I can tell that the same cello has been playing throughout a piece on a LIM, while in A1/GS, sometimes I feel they swapped instrument in between. This is of course splitting hair if there is no comparison, but it's probably the best I could describe it.

How much would you said that MILB divert away from the LIM in terms of this timbre coherence? A1/GS level or closer to LIM in this regard?

 

Now improved layering, clarity, apparently also better plankton and density does make it seem like I might prefer the MIL-B even at the cost of a hit in dynamics. Both plankton/clarity and dynamics are hugely important to me, but smoother transients and the density along with a more neutral tonality might win me over in the context of my system. Both speakers aren't lean and smoother transients could be a better match. But I do love me some hard-hitting dynamics while sounding "alive" from good microdynamics.

From what I understand the relative lack of dynamics and less zippy transients doesn't really make it sound more boring, does it?

Heh, movie theater blacks suck, at least the ones I have access to here. Film is even worse
The golden age of 1080p projectors had native contrast levels that modern 4K projectors still can't match. My X7 was only the beginning of that development. Some even swore by CRT projectors for their blacks and motion resolution.

Some OLEDs do have black-crush. It's really a matter of gamma, anyway. I calibrated my Plasma TV to a gamma which lifts the darkest shades near black a little - not a straight 2.4 gamma despite black being invisible to my eyes. The projector I calibrated to a similar gamma curve. The movie theaters here do seem to crush the darkest shades more to make it look higher contrast than it really is.