Schiit Gungnir Multibit impressions

What's weird is I seem to remember the Mjolnir 2 having 4 feet, but I could be wrong. Heck, even the Wyrd came with 4 little feet. Granted, you had to peel off the paper backing and attach them yourself...

 

Thanks guys.

Those fiends at Schiit have short-changed me. I demand four feet on my Gungnir Multibit!

I will have to learn to stop making my Gungnir Multibit wobble by pressing down on one of the back corners

 

But.. the Fulla 2 only has three and <dramatic organ chord> they aren't stick-on!

Those crazy guys.

 

It should be stable by itself. Obviously if you put pressure on either rear corner, say when moving it or making connections, it will lift in the front. There is no stability issue for the Gungnir Multibit alone.

 

I'll double check when I'm back from holidays but I'm pretty sure my Gungnir Multibit and Mjo2 both have 4...

Checked the manual online and both have attached feet.

 

My Mjolnir 2, which was purchased a couple months after release, has 4, one in each corner. My Gungnir Multibit, which was a Gungnir DS and is older than "Gungnir Multibit" (idk exactly how old as I bought it used) has 3.... so obviously there is some variability. All feet are the permanent screwed in type

 

Yeah both Gumbys I've owned had/have 3 feet, while the Mjo2 definitely had 4. Glad my memory isn't failing me.

 

Or you could put a tiny piece of paper under the sorbothane hemispheres, though that may lead to slippage.

 

I don't think having three feet would make it wobbly unless the back foot is not centered. Otherwise, I would suspect the surface on which it sits or maybe the case has a slight warp to it.

 

That's the point of having 3 feet - It never wobbles!

 

Hi. With my Gungnir Multibit, occasionally the "Buy Better Gear" light comes on and the sound is not quite so good. If I power cycle the Gungnir Multibit the light goes out and everything sounds great again. Is this normal / common behaviour? Thanks

 

I've never had the "Buy Better Gear" light come on. Try a different Toslink cable and or source. That PCI filter might actually make the sound worse. Just try out different combinations to rule things out.

 

I also have never had the "Buy Better Gear" light come on. Does the AXF-8 have another output-type? If so, you can try switching outputs and inputs to see if the issue is only from the AXF-8's TOSlink output.

 

Unfortunately, the AXF-8 only has TOSLink for digital out. I'll try and reproduce the conditions that cause the light to illuminate.

 

I tried my Gungnir Multibit out in my 2.0 system again last night, this time playing Tidal. What's great is that I can take the ethernet/airplay connection, use the dac-loop in my Hegel and plug in using the balanced cables. What's better is that I could remotely turn off-on this dac loop, essentially A/Bing rapidly the internal DAC and Gungnir Multibit.

The differences weren't night and day, but I couldn't believe that there were literally NO drawbacks using the Gungnir Multibit. What I previously experienced using the Gungnir Multibit was a restriction in soundstage - not so here oddly. Now I'm seriously looking at getting another Gungnir Multibit or Yggdrasil for the 2.0 system. There is a lot of convenience packaged into my Hegel and integrating an external DAC is incredibly easy.

Sadly, I may lose my Squeezebox Touch going this route - I really enjoy having the screen of what's playing. However, with an ethernet input into the Hegel, I can use JRiver on my media server and remotely control it, even downsampling DSD to play on Schiit gear. My SO loves using Tidal and Apple music because it's easy, so the interface wouldn't even change for her.

f'ing rabbit hole.

Edit: After searching I didn't come across an answer...

Has anyone compared the various inputs of the Gungnir Multibit? The coax and BNC should be the same...no?

 

Consensus probably is BNC > coax >>> toslink >>>>>> naked USB.

 

I concur, I've tried all different configurations and that was the best sounding for me also.

 

Cheers Fellas!

 

I've had the Gungnir Multibit cooking in my setup for the past few days and now that I've been able to go through most of my library with it I'd like to share some impressions. Truth be told, when I was starting out in this hobby I never thought I'd own one of these things, and even typing this now it's sort of surreal to look over and see it on my desk. Special thanks to a special friend who went out of his way to let me acquire one.

My chain now looks like this:
RME 9632 > SPDIF COAX > Gungnir Multibit > Valhalla 2 > HD650 (stock)

With regards to warm-up, the most obvious changes came in the first 12 hours or so. I honestly had difficulty discerning much improvement past the 36 hour mark, but I was pretty engrossed in not-so-critical listening at this point. I agree with what others have said regarding the warm-up improvements having a trickle-down effect, with clarity and fullness starting in the treble and eventually moving down to the bass.

For specific impressions, there is not a lot I can say that isn't common knowledge about this fantastic DAC already so I'm just going to focus on a few areas that stand out to me, the first being electric guitars. I listen to a ton of 90s alt and pop/rock so this has a lot of prevalence in my music and was the first thing I noticed about the Gungnir's presentation. The Gungnir Multibit manages to render guitars with the raw energy necessary to stay engaged without masking the little things the player is doing or turning the melody line of the track into barely recognizable mush. Even on tracks which make generous use of intentional distortion and amp feedback there is still instrumental information to be salvaged and the Gungnir Multibit plays it back unlike any DAC I have heard before.

This realism extends to the drum kit, which is another thing I repeatedly noticed in my listening. I already got a taste of this when I owned the Modi Multibit; but with the Gungnir Multibit I feel as though I can hear how the drum is being hit, with how much pressure, maybe even from what angle. On other DACs I can surely hear and feel the bass response but it never has that same level of depth that relates to how percussion is represented in reality. Zooming out in your typical rock arrangement to the rhythm section as a whole and listening to tracks where the HD650's mid-bass creep does not mask the bass guitar, I'm detecting synergies and interplay between the drummer and bassist I had never noticed before. While transients are usually an aspect of sound reproduction more attributed to amplifiers oddly enough I feel like the rhythm of tracks I have heard countless times before are kept better in time and never "lag" behind. While this may be a slightly warm DAC tonally, there is certainly no syrupy element or inner warmth to the sound.

The final aspect I wanted to touch on were vocals and specifically backup vocals. Small details related to the singer are resolved such as vocal inflections, their lips pursing on specific consonants or running out of breath towards the end of a longer note. The effects of vocal reverb or overdubbing are made quite apparent; whereas before I would focus on solely the main vocal track I now have the ability to zoom in or focus on sounds added in post-production. With each object on the stage having its own "air" or space around it backup vocals are no longer blended into the background and become more intelligible, even on more complex passages.

This realism as it relates to instruments and vocals is the greatest strength of the multibit DACs for me, and while I previously got a taste of it with the Modi Multibit I feel the Gungnir Multibit is a clear step above in this regard while piling on improvements in stage and detail retrieval. I feel it also keeps its value perspective despite the price gulf between the two, which is insane.

For fun, I tried the USB input briefly. As suspected, it was a large step backwards from using the digital output of my RME card. The sound was more forward in the upper mids/treble (unnaturally so), possessed a grayer background and had noticeably worse microdynamics with collapsed staging. I mention this because at this level of performance you really owe it to yourself to get off of USB as a digital source.