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

Discussion in 'Digital: DACs, USB converters, decrapifiers' started by drgumbybrain, Jan 16, 2018.

  1. RobS

    RobS RobS? More like RobDiarrhea.

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    LOL that's because you have an OG Freya in your chain. You can't possibly hear any differences thru that thing. Thinner than a supermodel on anorexia, blurrier than a fogged windshield in the winter, the most completely flat stage with ZERO depth, the most horrific uneven sounding dynamics. If the Yggdrasil is garbage, that thing is a f'ing landfill.

    And how can anyone take your transport shootout seriously when you had the Freya in your chain.
    https://www.superbestaudiofriends.o...sports-shootout-with-unison-usb-and-aes.8810/

    Here is what you said when you compared the Freya to other Schiit passive DACs:
    Yet somewhow you were able to say this in the transport thread:
    LOL wut? I'm calling bullshit now.

    And yeah if you have transparent components in your chain, the differences in DACs becomes quite obvious. It's super easy to notice the differences even on my "$300 pair of little plastic JBL nearfields".

    Like most people on SBAF, they like the sound of mud, jitter and they hate clarity. That's something I noticed immediately when I got the Goldpoint and Convert-2 in my system. You guys just don't have the components to sustain dynamics. Freya just muddies and smears over any kind of clarity.

    Heck you got a guy using TWO plugins to unfuck the Yggdrasil soundstage. And somehow there is no degradation in clarity from doing so? BS.

    OG Freya, give me a f'ing break. What an absolute abomination. I even warned the guy before I sold it to it sucked balls because I felt bad handing it over to someone, but I wanted to get my money back on the worst audio purchase I ever made.

    And my Gungnir A1 impressions were one night I was happily drunk and in a great mood so I'm sure anything would sound good. The next morning I listened again and it was like the worst hangover asking myself "WTF" was I thinking.

    You like what you like. I just think the Yggdrasil is a hot steaming turd. And I did elaborate quite a bit on why I think it sucked. I hope to get rid of it shortly.
     
  2. ultrabike

    ultrabike Measurbator - Admin

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    And that's kool, but let's hear what other people think as well.
     
  3. zonto

    zonto Friend

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    @ultrabike is being polite. We get it, @RobS. You don’t like the DAC. You’ve made your points, repeatedly. Now please shut up, sell it, and stop posting for a while. I’m sick of seeing your username in my inbox and alerts notifications.
     
  4. Buddha1979

    Buddha1979 New

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    The Yggdrsil is no garbage. I have had plenty of DACs in the 500 Eur price range and compared to Yggdrasil they were all shit, yes.
    Don't expect good results with a few hundered dollar speakers, sorry it won't work - that is my experience being a hobbyist for 25 years and previous HiFi salesman. Get some speakers that can handle dynamics well like some of the Klipsch stuff with horns or some of the older JBLs and you will beg for a DAC that plays smoother or even "muddy". I use DIY broadband speakers with no corossovers - so nothing is holding them back and they are fast. My system can handle PRAT very well and the Yggdrasil does not sound muddy especially on AES in and XLR out. I guess the Convert 2 would be overly bright or too analytical in my system and I am not going to give it a try as it is almost 3000 Eur in the EU.
    When it comes to soundstage also amps and the room play important roles. I have heard amps where the music is stuck at the speakers - when you close your eyes you know exactly where the speakers are and there is no real soundstage. The amp that I am using know plays very much 3D. Why there are differences - I have no explanation.
    I try to read between the lines here and still I am missing mentions of true alternatives for the Yggdrasil in the same price range. If there is a true alternative I might give it a try and post my impressions here !
     
    Last edited: Jan 24, 2020
  5. rlow

    rlow A happy woofer

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    Just to be clear, the quote about Freya was comparing passive modes. I don’t use passive mode on Freya, it’s not good, exactly as I described. Earlier in the post I had this:
    Yep that’s right, tubes. More distortion and coloration I know, horror of horrors. There’s other aspects of tube mode I like over passive as well, but won’t get into it here.

    I actually go between that, and running Yggdrasil directly into the Vidar monos (no preamp) and using digital attenuation in Roon. Would Goldpoint be better than that? Maybe, will see at some point.

    Really I’d love to actually hear Convert some day- who knows I may actually prefer it over Yggdrasil, and if so I’ll let people know why. Doesn’t mean Yggdrasil’s not still a great DAC though.

    Peace man, enjoy the music.
     
    Last edited: Jan 24, 2020
  6. Baten

    Baten Friend

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    I get that you wanted to rant/make a point but what does jitter even have to do with anything? The Convert-2 is not any better at being jitter-free than its similar priced brothers. Jitter was never a concern here..
     
  7. sphinxvc

    sphinxvc Gear Master (retired)

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    I just want to say something about staging.

    If you take 3 Yggdrasils and set them up in different rooms with different speakers, you'll get 3 completely different takes on staging.

    So, staging impressions are really only useful relative to prior observations made on the same set up. Not really comparable across set ups.
     
  8. atomicbob

    atomicbob dScope Yoda

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    I very much agree with @rlow here. Personal preference is absolute, for that person. Aggregation of performance observations into trends is a bit harder and requires thought by the reader along with familiarity of the multitude of posters' personal preferences to triangulate. There are only a few DACs that really deserved clear, generalized trashing such as S19 and several Topping DACs and some ESS9018-2M DAC implementations as demonstrated by universal trend among a large number of listeners.

    Schiit DACs do not fit this generalized trend so in my opinion don't deserve the harsh labels applied as if a universal observation.

    My ultimate frame of reference: comparing sound of instruments in studio and on stage with recordings of same. I have many raw tracks, prior to mixing, available to me but not shareable for obvious reasons of musicians' property rights. Recording the sound of an excellent musician playing a Monette trumpet into an AEA R92 and hearing playback approach the reality provides moments of auditory clarity, as one (of many) example(s).

    Examples available include Foxy Trot from Invisible Sounds, Steve Treseler Group:
    https://www.whirlwindrecordings.com...ca-nov-16th-video-of-foxy-trot-recorded-live/
     
  9. Psalmanazar

    Psalmanazar Most improved member; A+

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    Schiit DACs all sound very different. My favorite was the Bifrost Uber. I hated the other Bifrosts. I believe @RobS was trying to say the Yggdrasil A2 suffers from the dreaded "one note bass" syndrome common to a ton of hifi gear. It's not entirely one note bass like fart rocket ported powers but a lot of people like that warm, solid, blurred together presentation that gives weight to the low end of many recordings. Entire eras have common production issues so many people don't like: 1970s Asahi Super Dry drums, 1980s coked out, inadvertently high pass filtered due to the crappy caps in the console SSL 4000 mixes that all went through the bus compressor that lacked a sidechain high pass filter, 1990s ADAT and overdriven SSL 4000 distortion, most modern classical production, awful modern pop and indie music done on Macbooks with shitty Apogee Duets and UAD Apollos. There's a ton of widely chosen poor production decisions that people who want solid bass and big sound hate. I just get a different master. For Led Zeppelin, I prefer the 1990s CDs for half the records because they are the only masters with any low end. Iron Maiden? I go for the mastered for iTunes or latest CDs all day. Van Halen? the most recent CDs have the best balance. Motorhead? early 90s or the deluxe recent digipaks. They key is to avoid flat transfers from shitty 80s mixes or transfers from shitty old tapes like 80s Zeppelin, which came from metal tape cassettes.

    Then there is stuff just losing low end weight due to going through other common gear like RME converters, dbx 160 compressors, etc which often imprints things that aren't fixed or can't be easily fixed later in the mix or master without totally changing the sound of the record. These will be used in lots of modern no budget productions or in even in big budget studios. Modern 2020, in the box, digital production methods are more distorted than ever. Where Prince would just use a channel strip containing a filter, eq, and compressor on a drum, a Bruno Mars type production will use a channel strip plug and then shit tons of distortion plugins, have drum hits blended together with samples (think Andy Wallace but even more artificial than his 80s drum machine, I mean straight up sine wave reenforced bass), etc to make a highly artificial product for lossy streaming on far from flat Apple earbuds and modern broadcast limiters. The end result is slick modern pop but in reality, far more distorted and further from reality than 1990s Darkthrone, which is just lofi and sometimes tape saturated to hell with the first two records done pretty well in real studios.
     
  10. rlow

    rlow A happy woofer

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    Not to beat a dead horse here, but a Yggdrasil going into JBL 305 (or 30X) monitors from Drop. Possible impedance mismatch here? With passive pot in the mix as well (or even without)?

    I tried to find the the input impedance for the 305/30X but wasn’t successful - this is all I found:

    https://drop.com/buy/jbl-lsr305/talk/130423

    Says the balanced input impedance is only 600 ohms?? I know almost nothing about pro gear, but that doesn’t sound like a good match with Yggdrasil’s 75ohm output impedance, esp. going through a passive pot. Wouldn’t that potentially sound super soft?
     
  11. yotacowboy

    yotacowboy McRibs Kind of Guy

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    I thought A2 was supposed to be able to drive 600ohm (pro) gear just fine?
     
  12. rlow

    rlow A happy woofer

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    Yep seems to be the case, it’s actually right on the Yggdrasil product page that it will drive 600ohm pro gear. I wonder how a 10k passive pot/pre in the middle might affect it though? Probably fine. Ah well.
     
  13. atomicbob

    atomicbob dScope Yoda

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    LSR305 balanced input impedance measures 10K ohms (pin 2 to 3)
    I have one here on the bench and performed 4-wire measurement with Keysight 34465A.
     
  14. elmoe

    elmoe Friend

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    Pretty sure he sold the Goldpoint before buying the Yggdrasil.
     
  15. RobS

    RobS RobS? More like RobDiarrhea.

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    ^ Nah I kept it after the Freya disaster. Works perfectly fine with the monitors.
     
  16. elmoe

    elmoe Friend

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    Ah good thing too since you got another Convert-2.
     
  17. RobS

    RobS RobS? More like RobDiarrhea.

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    I found the tube gain&buffer in Freya worse than the passive. Saga's tube buffer with a Sylvania bad boy tube had great soundstage depth and excellent clarity. Both that and the SYS murdered the Freya. I got the Freya cause like you, I like a little tube color. I had two sets of tubes: RCA sounded very brittle, ragged and the Tung Sols were too polite. Goldpoint kicks ass and is amazingly transparent but I think it's overpriced. Granted I think most electronics are overpriced...

    The other DACs I've had in the same setup have all been fine with my systems, except Convert-2 was kinda funky in how it gave me this funhouse mirror effect in the center image which would wobble. Strangely this new unit I have doesn't exhibit the same problem. And Yggdrasil was seriously shoeboxed sized with little to no depth. Doesn't make sense in light of all the impressions folks have made here. Tried to do some speaker placement adjustments and such, but nothing improved. Gungnir was a little better in this area. Gungnir A1 definitely sounds a lot different than the Yggdrasil A2 that's for sure.

    I said my piece on the Yggdrasil with speakers. Folks lost their shit and felt personally attacked cause I didn't like their favorite toy. Not my problem. You can't enjoy what you like without needing the validation from others? I elaborated on my issues with it. Not writing a lengthy treatise on why I think it sucked unless I'm getting paid. And some folks think I post a lot of noise, well that just further discourages me from ever weighing in on gear cause I do make an effort not to. I did say I thought it was fine with headphones but that was ignored. I don't give a rat's ass about headphones anymore though.

    Context is everything. My impressions should be taken within the context of other components. You can't simply isolate a DAC totally on its own. Every impression comes with an asterisk with YMMV. It's like sphinxvc said earlier, impressions are only useful if you are only swapping out one component in the same setup. What doesn't work in mine might work in yours and vice versa. Maybe its the room, the cables, the power, speakers are off position by an inch, I'm in a depressed mood, I'm not using the right tracks to demo, and so on. Too many variables.
     
    Last edited: Jan 24, 2020
  18. Psalmanazar

    Psalmanazar Most improved member; A+

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    The Saga was awesome. Just needed to be balanced with more volume steps imo.
     
  19. purr1n

    purr1n Desire for betterer is endless.

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    Can you elaborate on what speakers and other components you were using in your Yggdrasil assessment? I find that very often, these discrepancies can be explained. I'm not sure you can bullshit without trying to get the root of it.

    It could be possible it's a matter of semantics. The Yggdrasil A2 has an upfront stage where you feel like you are sitting anywhere from row 2 to row 10. The flip side to that is you can sense the relative depth of each instrument, and most importantly, get a sense of the venue, its boundaries, reflective features, and so forth (whether real or artificially created in the mix). In terms of width, this tends to vary with the width of the speaker spacing, but relatively, I did not find it narrower than any of other DACs that have been through SBAF. Also, I have never heard any other DAC give me that sense of wavefront propagation from instruments on the soundstage, not even the ROCKNA which I recently evaluated which I felt was by far the best DAC I've ever heard overall (but still needs appropriate component matching).

    I hear you on the upper bass and lower mids, but I'm not sure I can hear this leanness. Or do you mean lack of body? Again, what speakers are you using? I ended up swapping the Gungnir A2 and Yggdrasil A2 between my two systems to alleviate this. The Gungnir A2 worked better on the OB which has poorer bass control and where the woofers were asked to work up higher. The Yggdrasil worked better on the big JBLs, which had tighter drier bass, but with a dedicated 10" mid taking over already at 350Hz.

    You are using balanced outs right?
     
    Last edited: Jan 26, 2020
  20. SSL

    SSL Friend

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    I'm sure you'd like for that to be true but I've never even heard Yggdrasil and probably never will.

    Thank f**k.
     

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