Does anybody have a list of songs that illustrate what the Yggdrasil can do?
I've finally had mine on for a week, and want to start doing A/B with my M7.
I'm on day 13 and have found that ever since I hit the magical day ten transformation, I've been listening to a lot of jazz, blues, and R&B, all of which I listened to occasionally before but were never staples of my musical diet. But now I've gone and spent a decent fraction of the purchase price of the Yggy on 192khz jazz and blues albums in the last couple of days.
A few of my favorite new acquisitions that really shine on Yggy (not all of which fit into the above categories):
- Getz & Gilberto
- Otis Redding - Otis Blue
- B.B. King - Live in Cook County Jail
- The Modern Jazz Quartet - European Concert Vol. 1
- Dexter Gordon - Go
- Miles Davis - Kind of Blue
- Eric Clapton - Slowhand
- Marlena Shaw - Marlena
- Ray Charles - Hallelujah I Love Her So
- Joni Mitchell - Blue
- The Rolling Stones - Hot Rocks
I've been trying to puzzle out the common thread that's drawing me to this music, and after some careful listening have come to the conclusion that there are a few factors at play which, combined, are letting me hear the most interesting parts of the music for the first time. Let me see if I can articulate them (disclaimer: I'm a long-time music lover and have a passing familiarity with signal processing, but I'm new to this hobby and will probably misuse some jargon).
1. Timing
I'm not sure exactly what accounts for this effect, but I can place notes more precisely in time. I can't imagine that the micro-level timing errors caused by jitter would be audible, so I'm speculating that the reason is more along the lines of all the tones and harmonics making up a note maintaining their proper phase relationships, allowing my brain to recognize them as a single coherent event rather than an overlapping blur (this is something I would expect of a oversampling filter that "preserves the original samples").
Mechanism aside, the end result is that I can feel the "groove" of the music much better. Jazz and blues performers play around a lot with timing, coming in slightly ahead of or behind the beat for deliberate effect. This was getting blurred out with my previous DACs, and I didn't even realize it.
2. Timbre
Another component of the music I didn't realize I was missing until I got it back with Yggy is subtlety of timbre. As I understand it, timbre is mostly audible as beats between nearby tones. Somehow Yggy is resolving the beats more clearly or preserving their timing better. Or perhaps it's somehow resolving nearby tones as distinct entities, when my previous DAC wasn't.
Without good resolution of timbre, most of the interestingness of woodwinds is lost. The long, boring sax note you hear on a mediocre DAC turns out to be full on subtle variations in timbre on Yggy. I'm not particularly engaged by Dexter Gordon on my old DAC. On the Yggy, I'm entranced. Same with blues vocals, where I get a whole new layer of emotional content from the way B.B. King manipulates the timbre of his voice.
3. Pitch
I'm hearing a couple of differences in how Yggy handles pitch relative to my old DAC. The first is that I'm hearing more realistic glissandos/portamentos (see Joni Mitchell), as well as tremolos/vibratos (see B.B. King) than I was before. I've seen studies that most people aren't particularly good at distinguishing pitch changes between two distinct tones played successively, but I've never come across a study of how well we can resolve changes in pitch in a continuous tone. I suspect that we're pretty good at hearing pitch errors in glissandos and tremolos, and the Yggy doesn't make any.
The second thing I'm noticing is better pitch accuracy in the upper registers. My last DAC was a Sabre and had the trademark issues with high frequencies, especially with redbook recordings. I spent a lot of time trying to work out what exactly was going on and ultimately concluded that the upsampling filter introduced pitch errors in high frequency tones in complex music. In spare music, the highs were reasonably accurate, but in complex music the upper harmonics would start to clash with their fundamentals and also to oscillate in both pitch and amplitude, giving them a "jangly" sound (in case it's not obvious, this is pure speculation based on subjective listening, not on any sort of real measurements).
I made the mistake of assuming that most of this was an inevitable consequence of oversampling, but the Yggy proved me wrong. It plays back the highs with every bit as much volume and even more detail than my previous DAC without sounding discordant. I attribute this to better pitch accuracy.
4. The Bass
Ah, the bass. I finally know what people mean when they talk about "Moffat Bass". To me, it's two things. First, it's that the precise timing mentioned above extends all the way down into the lower registers, whereas with my other DACs, the timing in the mid-to-upper ranges is significantly better than the bass.
Second, it's that the bass always seems to be in exactly the right proportion to the mids and highs. This was so unusual in my experience (probably says a lot about my experience level), that I spent a lot of cycles trying to work out how a DAC could do that before realizing, duh, that it was in the right proportion because the recording engineers knew their business. The Yggy was merely faithfully reproducing the bass as per the recording. This shouldn't be remarkable, but it is.
5. 4x Magic
While redbook is quite nice on Yggy, there is something especially magical about 176khz and 192khz recordings, much more so than I would have expected. Oddly, I tend to prefer redbook to most of the 96khz files in my collection (I suspect that's because most of them were either upsampled from 48khz or converted from DSD).
At first I thought that the extra magic was because Yggy was playing out 176khz and 192khz without oversampling, but now that the Bifrost MB product page is explicitly calling out its non-overampling mode, I'm thinking that if Yggy was doing the same, Schiit would have mentioned it. Maybe it's skipping the anti-aliasing filter? Or just using a less aggressive one? I would be very interested in hearing from Jason on this.
Wow, I intended to just reply to your post with a list of albums, but now I've gone and written a mini-review. Sorry about that.
