Schiit Unison USB

My DAC has a Unison sticker on the back, and is recognized by macOS as a Unison device.

 

Interesting. I’m not near my DAC right now to check the sticker (trying to keep this month-old baby from waking up), but the name in the source drop down in MacOS is “Bifrost Gen5” I think, so that’s good to know. I’ll check again in the morning. Thanks!

 

Good question. My late production Bifrost Multibit has a Gen 5 sticker on the back, and reports to Windows as Bifrost Gen 5

 

I assume if I sent a serial number to Schiit they could tell me whether it had Unison before I bought it and shipped it to them to upgrade.

 

Bifrost 2 was the first product that Schiit launched that had Unison USB built in. Previous Bifrost did not have it.

 

Perfect. Thanks!

 

On the back of the unit, near the usb should have a sticker. I believe they shipped with gen 5 usb.

 

Pretty sure the Beefroast 2 was the first in its line to feature Unison. According to this capture from June 24, 2019 on the Wayback Machine, the later Bifrost Multibit's would have had Gen 5.
http://web.archive.org/web/20190624192448/https://www.schiit.com/products/bifrost

*Edit: Once again, I replied before checking to see if there were more posts on the next page ... <insert my avatar>

 

Ordered the upgrade. Currently 34 of 34 on the waitlist, which is fine since the aforementioned newborn is curtailing my listening time anyway.

 

You can check which version of the usb input you're running by checking vendor id in Device Manager

 

Installed my Unison USB upgrade board to my Yggdrasil GS today. The only tools I needed was a #1 and #2 Philips head screwdriver and common sense. Just be careful not to be a gorilla with the ribbon cable to the front panel when separating from the board housing. The first thing I noticed was lower mids and bass were more pronounced and overall increase in coherency across all frequencies. The top end seems to be have a little more detail and " air ". Source was windows10 with Qobuz streaming using the PYST USB cable. Well worth the 150 bucks.

 

I don't know if anyone mentioned this previously, but my upgraded YggyA2U registers as 32-bit/19200 Hz in Win10's Sound settings in Control Panel (previously 24-bit/19200 Hz). While I know I couldn't hear the difference between 16-bit and 24-bit formats, I found it interesting that the upgrade to Unison (by Schiit in-house techs) somehow caused this change.

 

I noticed this also but given the FAQ on the Schiit website said it only has 24bit capability I ignored it and set sound settings to 24bit. I'd be curious to know if the 32 bit setting causes weird artifacts.

 

Bit rate and depth in Windows Sound settings only control the Windows mixer, if you use a music player that outputs via asio/wasapi it makes no difference

 

I dunno how related this is, but when I first hooked up my eitr, it defaulted to 32 bit. It just didnt work - no sound. And then once I switched to a normal bitrate, the 32-bit options vanished forever. I contacted Schiit about it and they didnt seem to know why it happened, but mentioned that it happened with some of thier other stuff.

So Im not sure if its related to unison. Might be a bug with w10.

 

That's funny I had eitr briefly and it defaulted to 24bit in windows and Jriver with no 32bit option.

With modius and Bifrost2 it defaults to 32bit. Since wasapi and Jriver is used it really doesn't matter though.

 

I also have the Eitr on my 2nd setup and I've never seen it register 32-bit, strictly 24-bit.

My YggyA2U however, plays the same on 32-bit as it does on 24-bit with no audible differences. Having said that, I'm going to double-check on that now.

 

I installed the Unison board this afternoon in my Yggdrasil replacing the Gen 5 board. (Thanks to the detailed instructions by @purr1n.) But I have encountered a few problems:

1. Although the default universal ASIO windows driver recognized the board in the device manager, I was unable to send any data to the dac using JRiver as source software, via the network (Server -> DLNA (renderer)) or locally using a directly connected small pc which is used as the end point. The error message received:



At this point, I downloaded and installed the older ASIO4ALL driver. Once I selected the Unison USB in the driver settings through the Playback Options in JRiver, it allowed me to send data to the board and have music play.

This the screenshot of the device manager and settings window for the ASIO4ALL driver.



From my understanding, the Unison board should be plug-and-play with Windows 10. But, this wasn't the case in my install.

At least, by being able to play music, both locally and over the network, I confirmed there was no user error in the installation of the board.

Nevertheless, I can't quite figure out why the Unison board requires the older ASIO driver and not the default universal driver for Windows. I had no problems with the Gen 5 board.

2. During testing, I played 24/192 files to the Unison USB (both upsampled and native files) (over the network and locally), and all I got was massive distortion and stuttering. Using the new board I was simply unable to play back these hi-rez files.

With the Gen 5 board, I would play upsampled 24/192 files from my music server, via the network, to the renderer (small pc) attached to the dac. This prevented the dac from switching the relays while formats changed during listening.

To make sure this problem wasn't a network or software problem, I tested the same files with my T+A dac, and had no issues.

I would have thought Schiit fully tested these board during the beta program, to make sure all scenarios would be accounted for? I can't believe Schiit did not test 24/192 files sent directly to the Unison USB.

All of this could just be a the driver issue. I will need to contact Schiit support on Monday, to see what thoughts they have on fixing this problem. Not being able to send 24/192 files to the dac makes the Yggdrasil a useless device for me.

And it would really piss me off if I have to revert back to the Gen 5 board.

Anyone have any thoughts about something obvious I may have overlooked?

Thanks.

 

I had trouble with ASIO when I installed the Bifrost 2. Below is the quote from Schiit.

"Try ASIO2WASAPI. That said, the basic wasapi push plug and play driver IS the unison driver... so there's really no reason not to use that unless you truly hate wasapi for some reason. All ASIO drivers are going to run the signal through a conversion from wasapi anyways." Grover from Schiit

 

Stop using fake ASIO for music playback, it has absolutely no advantage unless you:

1. Have audio production software that only works with ASIO
2. The project is light enough that it won't crash the driver.

All the sound you're playing through the fancy "professional" fake ASIO?

All the streams gets mushed together and played out as WASAPI.

Thats why that software exists, so that you can use ASIO-only software with Wasapi-only devices.

Its still WASAPI.

Putting a software layer in the middle is *not* making it sound better.

It can only do no change or make it worse, its not f'ing pixie dust magic, this isn't Windows Vista where you can't get direct access without hoops.

Stop wasting your time, just use f'ing WASAPI directly.