Modi Multibit: Multibit for the masses.

What happened to the posts from power supply boy? Or am I losing my mind (and yes I know the two are not mutually exclusive).

 

One thing I'm noticing is the R2R DAC amplifies the recording good or bad. Since you hear more of the recording, the flaws are becoming impossible to ignore. Even recordings I thought were previously good/decent kind of sound like shit now. But recordings that were excellent sound phenominal. This could also be in combination with the Valhalla 2.

 

You can definitely hear more recording flaws and lower quality recordings when using a good dac, but I don't think it makes them any less enjoyable to listen to. If anything, it makes me want to look for the better versions of the recordings if they're available. For example, Pink Floyd's discography has tons of remasters and some of them sound good while others sound terrible. The 2011 remaster of Animals is phenomenal in that it really balances out the bass while bringing out the clarity whereas the previous remasters were just warm and muddy.

 

@Hands :

1. When I do financial spreadsheets, music makes it that much easier to come up with better ideas (I am from Mars)
2. I have a closed office and make sure I lock the door; people have to call me on the phone
3. I am follically challenged

Now, you were saying ?

 

maybe someone has tried and can tell me... or maybe wants to share some general insights on this:
What would be the best scenario SQ wise:
1) Ipad mini 4 > wireless to Apple Airport Express > optical cable > Modi Multibit > Liquid Carbon
or
2) Ipad mini 4 > new Apple Camera connection Kit with USB + lightning power supply connections > USB cable > Modi multibit > Liquid Carbon

I ask while some say Ipad has many background processes running which detoriate SQ over USB. Also USB is said not to be the best input with the Modi. On the other hand some say there is lot´s of jitter with an Airport Express and optical inputs are not the best either...
I am NOT interested in playing High Rez, so that needs not to be considered.

 

Until I heard it for myself, A/B comparison, I was skeptical. Even the modest Gustard U12 DDC offers an improvement I CAN hear for USB->SPDIF for MoMB and BiMB. The U12 also remains in the format size and cost balanced with the MiMB and Vali 2 (EH 6CG7 tube). FTR, there are plenty of cable and other tweaks that my perceptual sensitivity is not high enough to detect so they aren't important to me unless I can hear it.

I don't think you are crazy, just fanatical.

Somewhere you mentioned how you don't see people getting much work accomplished with a desktop system of this quality. Living with such a system I frequently find it necessary to remove headphones, turn down so I can't even hear the residual to avoid being sucked into the music at the expense of no work getting done. These systems are that good to my ears. Then the RN D16 mutec MC-3+ AOIP solution is on the Yggdrasil/GuMB ZD rig reserved for dedicated listening, no distractions.

 

ModiBits lack of punch in the subs doesn't seem to affect HD600 as much as the LCD's. I'd guess this is because the Senns rely more heavily on upper bass than lower. Can't think of any other reason. Stevie Wonder's Innervisions gets my foot thumping great!

When listening to some sub-heavy stuff I guess I'll just switch to my Apogee Duet's DAC (and the Audezes). It's a shame I can't do it all with the new Schiit.

P.S. I had no idea DAC's could have such an effect in actual frequency response.

 

FWIW, I compared my Mac mini (2011) - Gov2 to iPad pro 9" -camera connection kit - GOV2 in my speaker system and the mac mini delivered, across the board, much better SQ. I think you are better off connecting your DAC to computer.

 

I can hear brick-wall distortion better on the Duet, but bass-guitar and many other tracks not high in the mix are easier to follow on the ModiBit. With the Schiit you can also easily pick out what kind of fuzz tone the bassist from Mastodon uses, for an example. So yeah, the instrument separation is audibly better, but there might be more stuff in the extreme ends of FR with the Duet. Stuff can get ugly more often with this old-ish soundcard.

 

"A good source" - before the DAC? Does that make a difference too? (Not counting a broken CD-player etc.) I would have thought that THIS was all about 1's and 0's, at least.

 

We're talking about things like CD transports, USB to SPDIF converters, USB decrapifiers, PCI/PCIe cards that bypass USB, etc. They certainly do make a difference.

 

Plebe.

 

Ok. I'm not willing to go that far just yet, meaning de-crapifiers etc. Too much of a skeptic I guess.

 

USB Audio and SPDIF don't have Error Correction Mechanism, so there is no error checking and packets resending in normal configurations. For electrical connectors, the 0v/5v voltages used provide though clear separation and 'flipped bits' don't seem to be an issue in realistic set-ups.
The remaining issues are the electrical noise being passed on from the source, jitter, and the noise emitted by the transceivers themselves (USB being a noisy fella, an SoC kind of thing). For optical connections, only jitter seems to be an issue (they're guaranteed free of electrical noise).

 

One interesting thing with USB Audio (even the 2.0 spec) is that there is no error detection or resending of data. This isn't very intuitive, since that provision is there for many other class-compliant basis devices (storage, network interfaces etc.). But for audio ... it's as dumb a stream as S/PDIF and AES3 (on which S/PDIF is based) .. albeit rather more subject to issues.

The only, current, audio standard that has error-detection and correction capabilities is HDMI ... but that has all sorts of other issues, including some horrible jitter potential.

It's a bit bizarre ... since Async (Isochronous) USB 2.0 Audio puts the synchronization/clock in the hands of the receiver, it should have been a trivial matter to have the target (i.e. DAC), just request more data than it needs, buffer it, and provide for ECC/re-transmit on top of that. But that's not what they did. Instead they kept it "real-time" (or as real-time as USB currently gets), and threw out any potential for error detection, much less correction!

Daft sods ...

 

Well, once you hear it, it cannot be unheard. Sources do matter. In my system it's easier to notice with speakers than with headphones, which is also rather peculiar as logic would dictate that headphones have more resolution to pick up on these differences than speakers. How much these difference matter to you is of course another matter...

 

For those that were interested in seeing how my Bifrost multi-bit vs. MOMBY impressions line up with Chord's Mojo, I posted some thoughts in a new thread: "Stacking Schiit Up and Finding One's Mojo".