Hacking Schiit

The weak RCA jacks are a real issue on these Schiit devices. Good fix. I know some that just replace with an actual chassis mount connector.

 

I have a 15 ft 75 ohm digital coax cable, and everytime I connect it to my gungnir's s/pdif socket I cringe at how it moves. But no issues other than pychological 6 years later.

 

Looks familiar.

 

Being a noob with electronics, question. Would there be a benifit to using an external LPS on the Gungnir dac? LPS power supplies seem to help most things. Anyone try this?
best,
Josh

 

dumb q, but how do you use an LPS w something w only an IEC inlet? like, how do the connexions work?

 

Gungnir has a built in linear power supply, it is not a switching type.

 

Schiit doesn't use SMPS in any of their gear.

 

thanks, I did not know that

 

This is incorrect. Fulla, Hel, Modi, and Modius all have switching supplies.

 

Bah, amateurs! Y'all should be converting to a battery powered DC system with an LPS, which then powers a perfect sine wave generator to feed your equipment.

It's to reduce the induced harmonic jiggelators from the power grid that creates parasitic distortion into the equipment regulators.

 

I stand corrected.

 

I wish that was wrong, but clean power does makes a difference. Some do take it a bit far though.

 

Not only does Gungnir have an LPS but it has a very good one too. Several stages of regulation and filtering. You’re not really going to do much better with a custom one unless it cost as much as a Yggdrasil. At which point you should just get the Yggdrasil

 

I could use a little help on this one friends. I own 2 Schiit Sys and I thought it would be really cool to put a r2r attenuator in one.

I mapped out the pin out on a Sys and used one of my spare 50kohm attenuators to wire it up, but when I did I got darn near unity gain with maybe 5% adjustable volume range. The stock pot is a 10kohm alps rk09. I double checked the pinout on the datasheet and everything is wired right. The amp it’s hooked up to is an Akitika z4 with 50kohm input impedance. The dac has a floating i.e. not connected ground if that’s relevant.

So, any idea where I messed this up? I think there is some additional wiring in the Sys I haven’t accounted for as the ground pins appear to be wired on a different layer i.e. not visible on the pcb, so this sucker is at least 3 layers. There appears to be a 10kohm resistor built in to the little switch as well, but I don’t know if that’s relevant. Is it replacing the 10kohm pot with a 50kohm one? I guess I could parallel a resistor to it.

Any help appreciated, even the sarcastic, grumpy and name calling kind.

 

A schematic of what you think you did and well lit, in focus pics of your work would help.

 

I don't know what an R2R pot is, but a standard stereo pot, looking at the knob facing away, is: col 1=ground, col2 = outputs, col3 = inputs. Each column has 2 pins, one for L and one for R.

 

R2R would refer to a ladder attenuator, usually. Distinct from series or shunt attenuators.

Goldpoint has a nice page explaining the differences: https://goldpt.com/attenuator_types.html

 

My bad, I was tired and frustrated so I guess I should have posted this first.

Here is the Sys as an overview, a very simple circuit:



There are 6 via's that represent the Vin, Vout and ground for the left and right channel respectively. Here's the spec sheet of the original pot to confirm this.





My understanding is that the Vin is 3, the Vout is 2 and 1 is ground.

Here is they layout of the replacement:



Everything appears to be wired as before, but I'm using a 50K pot vs a 10k pot and I read elsewhere that it could lead to much too high a volume. My new question is if the above is the issue, where do I place the parallel resistor? I believe a 14k should bring the effective resistance down to around 10K and hopefully not mess with the taper much.

Yes, that's what I think I have.

 

Plot twist, my stock Schiit Sys is having similar issues as my modded one. It has near unity gain at low volume and just sounds horrible and distorted in general. Must be some weird issue with my DIY DAC. Works fine with the bottle head crack... so odd. I think it might be a grounding issue. I don't think the input impedance difference of 50K for the Akitika amp and 100K for the crack would make much difference here.

 

It shouldn't. And that pot you have should have the same terminal position as the stock pot (most are the same) so if wired like for like there shouldn't be an issue.