Yggdrasil Refined - New Schiit Yggdrasil Analog 2 (Yggdrasil A2) Sound Impressions

Predator vision is an audio analyzer.

 

Hey, I don't care if anyone has bad things to say about Yggdrasil or anything else. Call it a poop-smeared window. It's just been awhile since I've read impressions on SBAF that were as baffling as they are verbose.

Well, no. That doesn't add up with calling the timbre good for classical. Timbre is a presentation thing, not a product of microdetail.

Still not sure whether it's the overtones that are gray, or the fundamentals. Or both? Is that a low-level detail thing, or a presentation thing?

 

Timbre relates to the quality of a particular sound, not sure what presentation has to do with it. He is saying piano timbre is excellent with the Yggdrasil, but overall presentation/slam is terrible and uniform across genres.

 

I vote that in this thread @RobS from here on out sends his posts beforehand to @elmoe so that he can re-translate them for the rest of us. @elmoe has been helpful in taking the massive logorrhea and making it into passable soft-serve.

 

Uh, presentation is just how sonic qualities are ... presented. e.g. "a mid-forward presentation". Saying that the "overall presentation is terrible" tells me nothing.

"Good piano timbre" is more useful, but I don't get how that jives with gray overtones. Or fundamentals. I'm still confused as to which we're supposed to be talking about.

So far it's not helping.

 

He didn't just say it was terrible, he went into details on how its terrible: dull, grey, lacking dynamics. Maybe just take your time and read slowly.

 

Okay, so the fundamentals - or maybe overtones, we haven't determined which - were dull and gray... yet the piano timbre was good.

I'm assuming you can see how this wouldn't make sense.

 

I think it's really a matter of whether or not you understand the terminology, which he uses properly here as far as I can tell.

That seems pretty clear to me. Overtones good. Fundamentals not good. Overtones play a large part into piano timbre, thus piano timbre good. Fundamentals play a large part into how the whole is presented, thus presentation bad. I am not sure how much simpler he or I could make this. Maybe google timbre, overtones, fundamentals as knowing what those are might help understand the description of what he hears?

 

No.

If you refer to a previous comment he calls the overtones grayish. Then here, he describes "lower tones" as having color and the fundamentals as grayish.

I understand the terms just fine. Their usage here is the problem.

 

No you don't. The difference is in the context. When he described greyish overtones before, he wasn't talking about piano timbre specifically, but about the general presentation of the music:

In that context grayish overtones goes hand in hand with his overall impression that the yggdrasil sounds dull and uniform. It's very clear in the quote above he's talking in general terms vs the specific piano timbre praise. The usage of the terms is fine, it doesn't take a genius to make the link here, he wrote half a book on how the general sound of the yggdrasil is dull and lacks dynamism yet shines with certain specific things like piano timbre. You just don't agree with him and have no argument against so you nitpick on terms definitions ignoring all context to try to invalidate his point and that's just more noise in the thread. Let's move on.

 

My actual reason for nitpicking is that I have 650 and Valhalla 2, so any impressions of that chain are of interest to me. If I didn't have any notion that there was useful information to be gleaned here I wouldn't bother trying to dig deeper.

Then we're back questioning how grayish overtones can also produce good piano timbre.

As I said before, these impressions are all over the place and have zero internal consistency.

The real noise is seeing a nonsensical wall of text from @RobS everywhere I look on this forum. I guess the conclusion of this exchange is that he doesn't actually have anything of value to say and I should just block him.

 

Maybe you should have done that from the start and sparred me a half hour of eye rolling.

 

I'm gonna be the dick here and suggest it's a power issue. buy a fancy power cord and a some cable lifters. </s>

 

Bacobits was probably right all along, get some mesquite wood blocks.

 

Fundamentals not good? Poop smeared window? Nope. I play piano professionally. Just tuned my 7’4” grand tonight. It’s in the same room as my Yggdrasil 2 Dac fed from Pi2AES running Moode. Supratek preamp, Pass amp, Eminent Technology speakers. Home brew cables (Belden) and power cords. This is by far the most realistic sounding Dac I have ever owned. Piano sounds live with all the fundamentals. Trust me I know about fundamentals especially after tuning my piano! Always thought my speakers didn’t have enough pop, whack, dynamics. That changed with the Yggdrasil. They sound like dynamic speakers now. Had a 3.5 hour listening session tonight ( listening to classical as I write this: Artist - A Winged Victory For the Sullen, track: Our Lord Debussy. Great late night stuff & perfect piano) also check out Ellis and Branford Marsalis album Loved Ones. Beautiful piano . Especially the track Maria. Gorgeous! Getting off topic here. This is a tremendously revealing, but natural sounding Dac and every little change affects the sound. Check those cables, clean the connections, do a double run of interconnects (Doug Schroeder Method) treat your room, it all affects the sound. No poop here, but definitely some great Schiit!

 

To put into context my criticisms are for pop/rock oriented stuff. The piano recordings I've heard are outstanding. Hopefully this clears up a bit. I understand where SSL is coming from as my impressions do seem contradictory and incoherent, but I will try to make my final impressions more intelligible and bullet pointed if I get around to doing after the next few weeks.

 

Perception is a big part of this hobby and being a pro musician doesn't exclude that, far from it actually. How many DACs have you compared head to head to the Yggdrasil?

 

I need a new source. Anyone experience a hardness of sound especially in the bass with Gen 5 USB? It's buggin me. I know I should ditch USB altogether. Looking at some other options, I changed my mind about getting a Pi based solution after I did some more reading into it. I'd like to try an AOIP.

 

I found Gen 5 USB to have a squareness and etch that bothered me, and this was with a $1K+ USB transport and power supply. I would imagine much worse with a computer USB source. I had to use Eitr which goes too far the other way, softening and bloating, but at least it wasn't fatiguing.

Can’t speak to AIOP but I’m going to assume they vary in performance like most things. You may want to check to see if anyone has compared. Or is it more the functionality you think you’ll prefer with AIOP?

 

Dante is great so long as you don't game through it - there's some delay, but movie players can be set to adjust for it.

I'm not current but I know @atomicbob uses it.