Life after Yggdrasil: Watering the Ash

If you don't want your stuff criticized it's best to avoid these parts.
The grayness will become apparent once you have compared Yggdrasil to a well made tube staged dac, for one example.
Same goes wrt to staging.
On it's own, and vs 99.9% of stuff on market, these attributes in Yggdrasil can't be found easily.
With headphones I personally wouldn't even bother chasing more.

 

With high pitched piercing/scratchy voice. (I envision Howard's mom from BigBangTheory)

 

What does that mean? Avoid these parts?

There is no grayness when I am listening to speakers (in a very quiet room) or headphones. Songs that go silent, like "Rock On" by David Essex, sound like the equipment is off.

What is wrong with the Yggdrasil staging?

 

@winders,
the grayness people here notice from Yggdrasil subjectively comes from dynamic performance, not noise.
Not everybody is bothered by it either.
There is also something about solid state devices that generally have that grayness to them.
Yggdrasil is not the most capable dac in perceived dynamics (both in range and proportionally).
Ink black background is as far it concerns me result of unhindered dynamics and tube magic. Well done tubes don't add grayness.
From speakers it's evident that Yggdrasil's stage is compressed in front to back projection, sort of wall of sounds 2m thick centered in speaker's plane.
(That is so in very nice acoustic environment.)
In comparison some S-D dacs I have tried have stage depth of 2mm, a paper. The illusion of more depth (Yulong DA8) comes from artifacts and unstable image.
Some other dacs can project ambient cues around the listener more evenly (like SFD-1, diy Soekris). Yggdrasil to my ears is still king in imaging precision.
The contours it draws around individual sounds are perhaps over-illuminated but incredibly clear.

 

I have way less experience than many here in listening to different DACs with different systems, but I think I hear what you describe above on quite a few recordings I listen to. On others, however, I hear a lot more depth, a notable case being the recent Jordi Savall recording of "Llibre Vermell de Montserrat" (PCM 88.2/24 on the version I listen to, but originally SACD I think). It was recorded in a medieval church in Barcelona, and the feeling of depth behind the speakers extends beyond the back wall of my house. A similar but lesser impression of depth arises in the wonderful kora classic "New Ancient Strings," also recorded in a large domed space. For the many jazz records I listen to, I agree that the stage is not deep, but then I listen to a lot of live jazz really close to the players and stage depth is not huge there either, so maybe I don't notice much difference. But I get what you mean for orchestral works, where the back instruments do not sound that much behind the front ones.

 

I don't know. The ALAC tracks I ripped from my 1979 TELARC CD of Erich Kunzel and the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra performing Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture have impressive width and depth on my nearfield setup. To be honest, I have not listened to it on a proper room speaker setup since 1983 or so. I have a Zubin Mehta Swan Lake performance from 1983 that has nice depth to it. Certainly more than 2 meters. This is especially evident in the track titled "The Swan Lake, suite, Op. 20a: Scene (Act 2)".

Based on my experience with the Yggdrasil, however limited it is, I tend to think the sound stage deficiencies are due to the recordings. Why? Because I have heard fine examples of depth, width, separation, and isolation. Beyond that, I also blame my nearfield setup. Once I get my 2 channel system setup, I will be better able to listen for this and provide more useful feedback.

I am not hearing this grayness you talk about. Maybe that is because I am using a hybrid tube amp.

 

im curious, what is your personal dac of choice

both affordable and unobtanium

 

Hoping not to get shot down, may I timidly suggest the Audio-GD Master 7 to be included in the audition list? I know it's PCM1704, but I've seen on occasions the Master 7 being hailed as better than the Yggdrasil*, so subjecting it to evaluation in largely controlled conditions would only seem fair (esp. since LaY 2.0 has a more academic bend to it). Perhaps the biggest reason not to audition this is the likely impending discontinuation of the product...

* Even The Marv has good things to say about it.

 

Why would you get shot down? People are usually open-minded but in a non-goofy-pompom-waving-way like we, unfortunately, are used in 99% of the internet, particularly in sites about hobbies. As long as it is within reason they usually consider, or not (usually with good reasons why), other's suggestions (talking about @Torq especially now).

 

If I can track one down to borrow for a week, sure.

He's referring to my potential reaction from my comments about it, and the behavior around it, from the original thread (where I was looking to buy an additional DAC for myself, rather than just do a broad comparison for reference purposes) in which the DAC in question was requested over and over and over. Even after I said I wasn't really interested in PCM1704 based units. Had rejected it over and over again. And had been on the receiving end of the multiple bouts of the typical Audio-GD fanboy nonsense as a result.

It happened enough that I was going to put a big counter on the main post that said "Number days since someone suggested the Audio-GD Master 7: 0". It would not have needed updating very often.

And it was a specific example, in this post, of one of the reasons I gave up on the whole process at Head-Fi.

 

Ah i understand now. Your topic on that forum got crazy indeed.

 

It certainly did.

There were a couple of real "special case" types over there. One, "deuter" I think it was, apart from being a rude f**k, attempted to "correct me in the error of my ways" regarding DSD, telling me things that I already knew, and didn't care about ... and that didn't do what he seemed to think they did anyway. He was clearly of the "DSD is god" persuasion. His directive to use HQPlayer to up-sample all my PCM content to "stunning DSD" made me laugh pretty hard and is probably worth commenting on here.

He was acting like doing a conversion to DSD got you all the purported benefits of DSD. Of course, this is nonsense. If we assume, for a moment, that DSD is somehow actually innately better than PCM as a way to capture, carry or replay music, we'd be losing those benefits the instant we went through any conversion to, and then from, PCM. Which, with some specific, limited, exceptions typically happens in most mastering/mixing scenarios anyway.

So, conversion to DSD doesn't, and indeed cannot, magically imbue a PCM file with any of the supposed benefits that DSD has. And this means that, with one exception, which I'll come to here in a moment, anything that's not native, end-to-end, pure DSD might just as well be PCM.

Now, the exception here is an important one. In the case that you have a DAC that actually sounds better playing DSD content than PCM (which would be an artifact of it's design/implementation and is not necessarily down to DSD, as a format or technology, being any better), then you might well gain something from converting everything to DSD. Though if this were the case, and it was noticeable, it'd make much more sense for the manufacturer to build the DAC such that it does that conversion internally so that it is operating optimally with as broad a range of sources/material as possible.

If you look at the PS Audio DirectStream DACs they do exactly that. You feed it PCM and it internally converts it to multi-rate DSD and then does it actual digital-to-analog conversion from that DSD data.

 

Got me a few chuckles out of that one. I'm not that savy on this and just the thought of thinking convertion would magically sprinkle PCM with something better out of the blue is just mind boggling.

Some people, like myself, have a lot to learn but the problem is when they don't realize it.
This goes way beyond audio, I've seen it regarding other hobbies also... experienced more then 1 DAC and 2 amps? So now you are a full fledged connoisseur. Built your first PC? You should help other's on every forum you can even though you were helped in the first place and are probably just googling and forwarding info. Have your new dog for more then one month? Share you wisdom and create a blog and tell other's what they need to do to achieve your expertise and the list goes on...

Nothing wrong with trying to help but we can see, too many times, the level of arrogance and high ego on these situations. Human mind is interesting indeed.

 

"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge" - Charles Darwin

 

See the Dunning–Kruger effect, aka the Lemonade Syndrome. Yeah, there is actual research done about this...

 

Yep, you can argue that on a D/S DAC it's already operating in 1-bit and it will have different filter behavior than the PCM mode and blah blah. I'm no DSD evangelist but I tend to listen to my SACD rips from the ISO or DSF for sheer convenience at this point. My DAC supports DSD over USB so why not? But converting PCM to DSD isn't going to turn a turd into a diamond. It might let you hear a different filter from your DAC but that's about it.
If you look at the spectrograms for SACD/DSD content, the actual cut-off points vary wildly. Some labels that know what they're doing have clean audio going way high up and ending before the DSD noise kicks in. Others have DSD eating the upper harmonics with no clear cutoff. This is what has delayed me from making PCM conversions for easier access. I want to keep as much of the musical content as possible in conversions but it varies. The irony being that most playback devices are going to cut it off at a default frequency anyway because of that variability. You can raise the high-pass frequency but then you're going to be letting noise in.

End DSD sidebar.

 

Seems like a good motto for the Sound Science section on HF*...

* Which could equally appropriately be described as a Dunning–Kruger basket case.

 

They could use that population in a study.
Now let's get back on track and wait for the next gear so we continue this (Torqs) journey.

 

WTF is a precise definition of a Franken Schiit? Rest assured, no bad feelings here, just curiosity.............

 

I believe this is how the locals have dubbed the Fryggy and Gumbreya contraptions... That is, Yggdrasil or Gungnir Multibit D/A IC out direct to Freya for the analogue section.