Schiit Yggdrasil Stereophile Review + Measurements

This will be my 3rd night in succession listening to my new Yggdrasil. Vocals are simply startling! I have never heard Piano like that from my system before..the air around the instruments ...Trumpet and Sax...OMG...Yea JA must be def !!

 

JA must be what?....like 80? He was "old" when I started reading Stereopile back in the 80's , so it still makes him a deaf old sod in any case. He needs to give it up with the reviewing and stay behind a desk or go away. Stereopile started becoming the Sears & Roebuck iof audio rags back in the early 90's.

 

It's a shame if that is the case. Obviously the Schiit guys, Moffat and Stoddard, have been around this business for quite awhile, not to mention they are regular Stereophile advertisers. I especially enjoyed their "Obsolete" ad in the latest issue.

 

Of all the DACs I've heard, and there have been a few, nothing beats Yggdrasil for rendering Piano.

Even my current vinyl rig, modest as it is, doesn't get close. Though I hope to rectify that in relatively short order now that the fiddly parts of my move are complete.

 

after reading this thread, im even more disgusted by Stereophile.

 

And bass. One of my favorite Yggdrasil albums is the hi-res Naim release "Nightfall" by (sadly departed) Charlie Haden (bass) and John Taylor (piano). Actually, several other Haden piano duos are fabulous Yggdrasil fodder, including "Last Dance" (ECM) with Keith Jarrett (very sad knowing that Haden was recording it as a self-eulogy), "Tokyo Adagio" (Impulse) with Gonzalo Rubalcaba, and "Night and the City" (Verve) with Kenny Barron. Arrgh, I miss Charlie Haden.

 

Consistency in grading is for weaklings

 

Consistency is the hobgoblin of a shallow mind. Misquoted from someone.

 

Torq...I never even thought that you'd be a Vinyl guy. What I cannot understand about Vinyl enthusiasts is how the dragging noise of the stylus on the vinyl can be tolerated. One of the neatest things about Headphone listening to a Digital track is that when a quiet passage comes....there nothing but black silence zero noise....that just cannot be said for vinyl.

I use to have a real fancy rig that could hold more than one Tone arm, I had the VPI record washer...the little doodad that lifts the tone arm at the end of the album...all that stuff. I reached a point to where I had had enough...all I want is to do is hear the music....Vinyl is almost a religion....I guess you could say I changed faiths...

The Yggdrasil seems to render vinyl as dead to me...

 

I was, for a technologist, a late convert to digital. I had a CD player from about 1985, but I bought 99% of my music on vinyl until coming to the U.S. in 1996 (which currently amounts to about 12,000 vinyl albums*).

Surface noise is a minor concern for me in a properly setup system. It's only audible on run-in/run-out and in almost silent passages and is not any more intrusive, I find, than, say, the natural ambient noise in a quiet concert hall during similar passages in a live performance. I'm more interested in the conveyance of emotion and being able to lose myself in the music rather than any particular technical aspect of the rendition. For me, vinyl does that better.

And I tend to find my vinyl listening is always album/performance at a time, rather than the more playlist-centric approach I tend to follow with digital. Of course this is somewhat due to the nature of LPs ... and the requirement to actually get out of my chair to change sides or tracks. But mostly it's about involvement.

Then, and I find this funny every time it happens, whenever one of my non-audio-focused friends hears my vinyl rig (which is very modest compared to many here) they always comment about the lack of clicks, pops and noise. Indeed, take some of my needle drops and even with headphones I have to turn them up way louder than I could endure listening to them to even hear the surface noise on a clean, static-free LP.

Even the little Rega Planar 3, feeding the Jotunheim phono-card, I put in the office at my "day job" does a very nice job in this regard.

I like the rituals of vinyl as much as the sound, though I probably spend more time listening to digital now purely as a matter of practicality (i.e. it offers me far more situations in which I can enjoy music than is realistic for vinyl).

--

*I had started moving these from storage in the UK, which with the decision to live on the downtown waterfront is going to be a problem, as the storage required here would be a significant chunk of my living space! So I'll probably have to select down to the top 500 or 1,000 and/or rotate things.

 

“Somebody was trying to tell me that CDs are better than vinyl because they don’t have any surface noise. I said, “Listen, mate, life has surface noise.”

-John Peel

 

I remember at the time of the diy buffalo 2 DAC hype a couple years back.
my dad came home with a sl-1200 TT and a cheap MM cartridge and cyrus one amp with the built in phonostage.
the buffalo 2 was so outclassed I was embarassed.
my dad still to this day talks about that episode as soon as I talk to him about "highend" dac.

 

Much depends upon the definition of a corrupt press. I must say I have been well known to Stereophile since the Days of J. Gordon Holt, then Larry Archibald, and now John Atkinson. It is understandable that a magazine, real or virtual, needs some kind of revenue stream to survive. That is a price that all of us indirectly pay for, and I can say that most of the time, for most of the equipment makers and readers, over the last 60 years or so that Stereophile has been on average, quite fair catering to an industry which has inflated itself into a certain sort of near extinction – the makers who support that pricing stratum of audio equipment are slouching towards life support. The industry is sinking into dreams which are leaden concertos for kazoos and trash can lids. It is sad to see the remaining inflexible and clueless high-enders wonder whether they are awaiting rescue by MQA or a return to the great 1970's once again. The review of Ferrari priced gear is far less arrogant than it is perceived to be – they know not what else to do and are legacy blind.

I digress – I believe I was defending Stereophile's usually successful attempts at fairness – in my earliest of manufacturing days they gave me attention without ads. Their current writers like our products but the problem is with the editor. This is a personal John Atkinson vendetta against Schiit, probably due to his perception of our irreverence. Further, he cast the first stone on the Raggy then Yggdrasil reviews culminating with his FB post. What he fails to grasp is that no matter what he does or does not do, it will have zero influence on what we do and how we do it. In a greater sense, it will have even less influence the industry as they hasten down the wind to irrelevance.

Rather than wasting elevated blood pressure with anger, a certain sadness settles over me to see a former publishing cornerstone lacking the vision to stay the course of the entire quality audio industry's run. The assumption that our business universe is now and forever shall be static has killed everything from Earth Shoes to Hula Hoops. John Atkinson is a very bright man. It is just such a pity that the intelligentsia are so often myopic. We shall see what awaits next month in The Absolute Sound review.

It is time for us to change our industry's moniker from High End to Craft Audio.

 

Small batch artisanal organic cruelty-free audio.

 

Mike,

I particularly salute your irreverence! I love how both you and Jason think. Your interviews with Darko were great! I seem to sense that both of you guys still actually care about the music! You had to of to make the Yggdrasil so magical!!! Never ever heard Piano...and now Baritone Sax sound so chillingly real in my listening room!!

My Yggdrasil showed up just last week, so I guess I'm a now a new Schiit head...AND PROUD TO BE!

When JA himself talks about the benefits of the $50 AQ Jitterbug being in his system, he became the shill I cannot trust anymore...I still love my mags though....Been reading Absolute Sound since the early 70's.... Back when Audio magazine still existed..they have their place, but nothing woks better than your own ears!

You and Jason keep up the great work that you two do!!!

 

To me it was obvious things were personal when I read the sonic impressions part of the review, with the "smirking" theme running throughout. It was obviously a slap disguised under positively-seeming verboseness...

 

I once spent many dollars and many hours on Stereophile. Now I prefer to scour the forums for knowledgeable persons, listen for myself at meets, etc. and make my own measurements.