The Mike Moffat (#2 at Schiit) Blog

The whole point of GAIN was to digitize analog recordings. MFSL has always tried to get the master tapes or best copy tape available to master from.

 

Coltrane is still alive. He and Tupac are roomies. They travel the country with Kurt Cobain engaging in wacky adventures and mishaps at every stop.

 

Yeah, I'd love to have all those! I think I only have like one of them - Getz/Gilberto which i got for a song from Murfie. I'm sure some of those (like Folk Singer) are astronomically priced.

 

I've been looking at options beyond Discogs or similar, and Qobuz seems to have at least some of those albums at non-insane prices (including streaming for some). For instance, Qobuz has several variations on Coltrane's "Ballads", including this one, a 2002 edition from Impulse!:
http://www.qobuz.com/gb-en/album/ballads-deluxe-edition-john-coltrane/0073145895482

I can't be sure it's the same vintage as the 1998 release, but I like what I hear, and it could very well be a reprint. Same for "Folk Singer" from Universal:
http://www.qobuz.com/gb-en/album/folk-singer-muddy-waters/0060254749760

At under 20$ or streamable, I'm ready to give it a try... (I know Qobuz isn't available for US folks, but maybe similar options exist there.)

 

Qobuz has MFSL masterings? I would be very surprised if that were so. AFAIK, MFSL almost never licenses out their masterings (although the Vinyl Me Please release of Pinkerton does use the MFSL stampers).

 

I think he was says by that those are not the MFSL but that he likes the versions that they have.

 

Ahh, gotcha.

I will say that those GAIN 1 releases sound especially good on a Schiit multibit DAC, which shouldn't be a surprise.

 

Mike on some of the hiccups one may encounter with Eitr:

 

I like writing here because this is the last redoubt of American Audio Civilization. It does not cater to what my beloved high-end audio has become in the last generation or so:

Unearned equity high-enders who think they can buy their way into the best audio, spending money they sometimes do not have to impress people they do not like. These are the sort that endlessly repeat buzzwords they do not understand in an effort to convince those who have spent less how informed they are. They then morph to moist snowflakes and mollycoddles if anyone criticizes their system. These are like those who purchase Ferraris and then destroy them in single car accidents.

Thank God I do not build that sort of audio, or worse yet, work as I did forty years ago for Douglas Aircraft. I know I am a relic from another era who could never dress up in drag as a metrosexual in some f'ing prissy office ghetto. Instead, I can say with pride that I absolutely love my job and therefore never have to go to work.

 

This is the secret,
do what you love and love what you do.

JJ

 

You are indeed fortunate to be in this position. I would suggest that this would put you in the minority - certainly in the minority of the folks that I know.

After nearly 30 years as a corporate wage drone in various organisations around the globe, I can honestly say that I now heartily detest the corporate office environment and all the politics and rancid ego-driven bullshit that goes with it. I continue to do the meaningless crap that I do because it pays a fuckload better than mixing concrete. If I can last another 4 or 5 years I will be setup to chuck the corporate world away forever. That will be a happy day for me, to say the least.

My passion for music helps keep me (somewhat) sane. Products like the Schiit Eitr help with that, so Thank You for that.

 

@baldr - Really hope you and Jason continue with what you are doing right. In no particular order -

Value, products at different price points, clever Engineering designs, listening to your stuff vs shipping specs, focus on what is in the box over the box, up-gradable products, humor, skipping the BS claims, and yea, making these products as much as possible in the USA ( yea I know someone is gonna give me a dislike, but hey I live here so )

p.s. Good to read you are enjoying it too. The bigger the company the more time spent on corporate BS vs just making great products.

 

The below is a rewrite of a dumbed down post I unleashed on another forum catering to readers of far less common sense:

Why I2S sux for me: Way back in 1983, when I built my first D/A converter for high-end audio, there was little need for connectivity, as early digital boxes were single purpose appliances. At that time, I had what I thought was a unique idea to separate the mechanical and D/A converter sections of CD players. It did take a while, as we had to build our own digital signal processing circuits, since no special digital audio chipsets were available. SPDIF did not exist as of yet (and this was decades before USB).

The irreducible minimum of digital audio signals are Bit Clock, Word Clock, and Data; BWD. These signals are multiplexed and demultiplexed in all other connection protocols, even in I2S. Three clocks, 6 wires with grounds: 16, 24, or 32 bits of data, which are clocked into D/A converters with each bit clock until one channel of the sample is complete and the word clock starts it over with the other channel. With data overhead, 3MHz at 48K sampling, doubling to 6 and 12 Mhz at 96 and 192KHz sr. This is the most complicated but by far the best sounding way to hook a digital source to a digital converter. Period.

Within a year or two, SPDIF (actually S/PDIF) Sony/Phillips digital audio interface coax and later TOS (Barf) connections were available on CD players. I added the SPDIF to my prototype and Theta Digital was born, back in 1985. I had a way to hook my D/A converter universally to CD players. Soon, Wadia joined the party, and then there dozens of companies making them within a few years, as cookbook chipsets became available. This enabled anyone who could read to build an so-so D/A converter, which was good to legitimize the idea of the D/A converter, but the chipset designs typically sounded like ass.

With S/PDIF came a quandary. Even though SPDIF enabled any CD player (the source of the era) to be hooked up to any D/A converter, it did not sound as good as BitWordData. The problem with BWD was inherent fragility; digital audio signals were exposed to static and the possibility of shorts which could and would blow the f**k outta some very fundamental parts of the circuitry that in many cases could render the source expensive junk. S/PDIF solved the fragility and the closed nature of the BWD connection at some expense deducted from sound.

Then it got worse – Phillips, yup Phillips, invented I2S and I2C as a novel way to reduce wire counts in interfaces. Since I2C is for control, I2S for music. I2S was their method of reducing 3 digital audio signals down to two. Ugh, bad multiplexing causing I2S to sound sound like ass compared to BWD (but still arguably better than SPDIF), and it has all of the same fragility, closed loop, and non-standard problems as BWD. Since it was simpler and cheaper, I2S won out over BWD as an internal standard to hook up digital audio appliances. Figures. Surprise, surprise.

So, you may ask, since I2S is marginally better better and BWD waaaaaaaaaaaaaay better than SPDIF - Why doesn't Schiit use it? Schiit is a company selling big bang for the buck products. We have no sales dept and only one guy for customer service, we must avoid expensive overhead which flies in the face of our "bang for the buck" theme. If you frequently connect and disconnect, you will sooner or later have trouble. It also closes up the system and makes it awkward to audition other types of gear. Customer service intensive.

Am I closing the door on I2S as an external connectivity standard for Schiit gear? You bet – it is a wet dream compared to BWD. However, all of our digital gear is upgradable and it is not out of the question that I may offer BWD as an external connection between our gear. The only problem is that I would have to make a digital source component first.

A query has resulted in clarification and correction based on review of some very old schematics, recall of tech memories of 40 years ago, and docs of the first pre Theta D/A converters.. I2S is defined as a three wire system. Bit clock, Word clock, and Data. Sounds like BWD, no?? There is one major difference between I2S and BWD. Above I referred to muxing and demuxing. Necessary with I2S because unlike true BWD, where the data begins in sync with the word (channel clock), the data is delayed exactly one bit clock after the word clock. This allows two wire interfaces as bit clocks are easily derived as a difference on the bit clock interval, obviating the need to run the Bit Clock. That raises the I2S fucktivity up several notches, because it is necessary to decode, resync, and defuckify the data back to the word clock where it belongs. That was the operation where I could not deassify the sound of I2S.

 

BWD actually sounds like too much trouble to use externally. I'd rather just see a Schiit CD player that uses it internally.

 

For a CD player to use BWD internally, that means it comes bundled with a DAC. To get Yggdrasil level performance, it would be like buying an extra Yggdrasil along with the CD player.

 

@baldr Maybe this is a really dumb question, but how / why would BWD help in the modern world, when your (higher end) DACs are isolating and reclocking all the inputs anyway? It seems like BWD vs I2S is more like an internal implementation detail inside the DAC.

 

Or media player...

 

Schiit could create a stand-alone CD transport with standard digital outs PLUS proprietary BWD out, and then offer a BWD input upgrade for Yggdrasil...

 

I hope we see it, but I'm not really sure how BWD fits in with Manhatten Project and it's focus on modifiying the digital bitstream. Are those two things really compatible with each other?