[deuter]

USB audio gives you too much flexibility, like having a cheap but decent source such as a NUC computer.
In addition it gives you DSD. 
 
Its hard to beat these especially when Coax is RF noise prone and Optical is jittery.

 

[Torq]

  USB audio gives you too much flexibility, like having a cheap but decent source such as a NUC computer.
In addition it gives you DSD. 
 
Its hard to beat these especially when Coax is RF noise prone and Optical is jittery.
 

 
S/PDIF COAX, implemented per the more-than-20-year-old-specs is galvanically isolated and less noise-prone than USB 2.0 will ever be short of heroic, expensive, needless, measures.
 
Jitter, measurable, never mind audible, with TOSLINK (never mind ST) for R2R solutions is irrelevant.  It might affect DS solutions, but it's out of band for any half-way competent multi-bit PCM implementation.  No one relevant slaves the DAC's clock to the S/PDIF clock anyway ... it's invariably, minimally, if imperceptibly, buffered.
 
In my, now extensive, evaluations (with largely TOTL gear), DSD is different but not better, than PCM, so a bit of a red-herring.  It's also a vanishingly small aspect of the audio landscape.  Converting PCM to DSD is just pandering to specific DAC implementations, and unnecessary if you do things "properly" in that realm (e.g. PS Audio & Chord).
 
Do some listening, or some math, post some actual listening impressions and stop spouting ill-informed/miss-understood third-party dogma.  The sniping-without-backup is getting really old.  Disagreement is fine, but if you can't back it up with specifics it's just noise.
 
I say this as an engineer.  As well as a music lover.

 

[Torq]

I have a little board here ... as part of my own DAT project ...
 
Right now it runs about $8 in total, which is based on a VERY short run of PCBs and very small parts quantities ... en-masse and built-in China, I could probably get to $2/board, maybe less.  
 
And this board delivers jitter numbers under 50 ps (the best, most stringent, studies I've been able to find mark that as the very limits of audibility), even for ropey plastic optical.  That's well below audibility for multi-bit designs and, as far as I've seen/heard for D/S as well.  I'll let the likes of Rob Watts or the guys at ESS correct me there.
 
I take Nature, Science, the "Lancet" and so on ... among a number of other formal scientific journals.  I have multiple patents in the space - Xilinx, and thereby, indirectly, Chord, for example - are licensees.  And I've implemented orbital and deep-space systems at far higher bit-rates and levels of criticality, with massively invasive external noise profiles, than audio will likely desire, let alone require, in our lifetimes.
 
I'm just not buying, on theoretical or observed, grounds that USB is the best way to do digital audio today.  At BEST all it does it is give the DAC control of the clock.  There's more than one way around that even for the most pot-addled, sleep-deprived, engineer!

 

[deuter]

   
S/PDIF COAX, implemented per the more-than-20-year-old-specs is galvanically isolated and less noise-prone than USB 2.0 will ever be short of heroic, expensive, needless, measures.
 
Jitter, measurable, never mind audible, with TOSLINK (never mind ST) for R2R solutions is irrelevant.  It might affect DS solutions, but it's out of band for any half-way competent multi-bit PCM implementation.  No one relevant slaves the DAC's clock to the S/PDIF clock anyway ... it's invariably, minimally, if imperceptibly, buffered.
 
In my, now extensive, evaluations (with largely TOTL gear), DSD is different but not better, than PCM, so a bit of a red-herring.  It's also a vanishingly small aspect of the audio landscape.  Converting PCM to DSD is just pandering to specific DAC implementations, and unnecessary if you do things "properly" in that realm (e.g. PS Audio & Chord).
 
Do some listening, or some math, post some actual listening impressions and stop spouting ill-informed/miss-understood third-party dogma.  The sniping-without-backup is getting really old.  Disagreement is fine, but if you can't back it up with specifics it's just noise.
 
I say this as an engineer.  As well as a music lover.

Not sure how to backup claims in this case. There is a reason why CD players are slowly disappearing. There is a reason why suddenly there is focus on USB audio.
There is a reason, may be its incapability of Optical to transfer 192khz. May be its something else.
Don't know, but interested to know what your observation was .
 
 
Oh and stop being so defensive, we are engineers too  

 

[Torq]

  Not sure how to backup claims in this case. There is a reason why CD players are slowly disappearing. There is a reason why suddenly there is focus on USB audio.
There is a reason, may be its incapability of Optical to transfer 192khz. May be its something else.
Don't know, but interested to know what your observation was .
 
 
Oh and stop being so defensive, we are engineers too  

 
Optical, even plastic TOSLINK via S/PDIF, is MORE than capable of 24/192 transmission.  My years-old AK120 handles that just fine with a $5 cable.  I have a nice little rig at work that tested a $100 Lifatec cable to more than 40x spec (many times more bandwidth than needed for DSD512 ... of which there is, oh wait, no content at all).
 
If you're an engineer, then post something vaguely representative of engineering and/or scientific discipline ... instead of one-or-two liner dogmatic sniping.
 
CD players are disappearing because the music-buying public prefers iTunes, Amazon, Google, streaming, piracy or YouTube.
 
USB audio is rising not because it's "better" but because every computer has a USB port.
 
Don't confuse with ubiquity with quality.  Otherwise we're all driving Fords.
 
And if you want to claim "engineer" with me, then you'll need to start talking like one instead of rattling off the same tired-old rhetoric for those that don't know their arse from their elbows.

 

[landroni]

   
There is a reason, may be its incapability of Optical to transfer 192khz. May be its something else.
 

 
Optical can transfer 192 kHz. The Lifatec, for instance, is officially specced at above "the 15Mbps data rates required by Toshiba's best Toslink optical modules", and:

 
To reliably feed the full 24 bit/192 KHz capability of Yggdrasil, you need a data-rate of 12.4 Mb/s, which requires a clock-rate, for S/PDIF at least, of about 24.4 MHz.

 

[rgs9200m]

Just to clarify, I get the feeling that, although they sound different, you feel the Hugo TT sonic performance is on a par with the Yggdrasil, but that they excel in different areas, and you lean in preference towards the Yggy sound package, and you are not suggesting that the Yggy sound is significantly superior overall, especially in tonality.
Your main gripe is the price of the Hugo TT for the level of performance vs. the Yggy.
But if the prices were identical, on the basis of sonic performance alone, it would be a tie.
Is this a fair summary?
Thank you again.

 

[iDesign]

Just to clarify, I get the feeling that, although they sound different, you feel the Hugo TT sonic performance is on a par with the Yggdrasil, but that they excel in different areas, and you lean in preference towards the Yggy sound package, and you are not suggesting that the Yggy sound is significantly superior overall, especially in tonality.
Your main gripe is the price of the Hugo TT for the level of performance vs. the Yggy.
But if the prices were identical, on the basis of sonic performance alone, it would be a tie.
Is this a fair summary?
Thank you again.

The comparison is somewhat skewed because the Hugo TT includes an amplifier whereas the Yggdrasil does not. Chord maintains that some transparency is lost by using another headphone amplifier with the Hugo TT which makes the direct comparison tricky. There have been some comments about size in this thread and I suspect the Hugo TT will appeal to a different buyer because of its small footprint as an integrated unit and less so as a standalone DAC. The 2Qute is a better comparison to the Yggdrasil.

 

[Cobold]

 

Chord

,,,
 
Hugo TT (-)
 
A little more air to the presentation than it siblings, and a bottom end that seems more like Mojo than Hugo, while actually resolving more detail than Mojo, particularly in the upper registers, but not apparent on every recording by any means.
 
I think Yggdrasil beats this in most categories, though the Hugo TT yielded a slightly more palpable 3D soundstage and in some cases had a tad more air to the rendering.
 
If they were the same price, I’d still take Yggdrasil over Hugo TT, but since Hugo TT is more than double the price of Yggdrasil it makes the decision even easier for me.
 
....
 

 
This doesn't sound like a tie to me.

 

[maxh22]

The comparison is somewhat skewed because the Hugo TT includes an amplifier whereas the Yggdrasil does not. Chord maintains that some transparency is lost by using another headphone amplifier with the Hugo TT which makes the direct comparison tricky. There have been some comments about size in this thread and I suspect the Hugo TT will appeal to a different buyer because of its small footprint as an integrated unit and less so as a standalone DAC. The 2Qute is a better comparison to the Yggdrasil.

Torq is not fond of the sound signiture of the 2Qute. All of Rob's dacs, atleast from the Hugo forward, do not use a seperate headphone amplifier and instead use a variable line-out.  Mojo, Hugo, and Hugo TT output the same amount of power.

 

[iDesign]

  Torq is not fond of the sound signiture of the 2Qute. All of Rob's dacs, atleast from the Hugo forward, do not use a seperate headphone amplifier and instead use a variable line-out.  Mojo, Hugo, and Hugo TT output the same amount of power.

Yes, I fully understand the design of the line out used in the Hugo, Hugo TT, Mojo, and DAVE. I also understand why Rob Watts feels some transparency is lost when using another outboard amplifier-- thats what makes the Hugo TT tricky to evaluate against the Yggdrasil in a headphone system versus a two channel loudspeaker speaker system. 

 

[Torq]

  Just to clarify, I get the feeling that, although they sound different, you feel the Hugo TT sonic performance is on a par with the Yggdrasil, but that they excel in different areas, and you lean in preference towards the Yggy sound package, and you are not suggesting that the Yggy sound is significantly superior overall, especially in tonality.
Your main gripe is the price of the Hugo TT for the level of performance vs. the Yggy.
But if the prices were identical, on the basis of sonic performance alone, it would be a tie.
Is this a fair summary?
Thank you again.

No, not really.
 
I think Yggdrasil outperforms Hugo TT quite readily and for less than half the price.
 
What I said was that, even if Hugo TT was the same price as Yggdrasil, I'd still buy the Schiit DAC ... despite it just being a DAC.
 
Hugo TT is very good, to be sure, and if I needed a very compact all-in-one solution, I'd consider it if I could snag one for half it's MSRP.  But even then, it's not that much better than their own Mojo (and tonally more similar to it than the Hugo or 2Qute) that I'd want to spend the extra cash.  Take that as praise for how good Mojo is rather than taking anything away from the Hugo TT.
 
So, in short, I think Yggdrasil betters Hugo TT and don't consider them tied.  That's just me though!

 

[Torq]

The comparison is somewhat skewed because the Hugo TT includes an amplifier whereas the Yggdrasil does not. Chord maintains that some transparency is lost by using another headphone amplifier with the Hugo TT which makes the direct comparison tricky. There have been some comments about size in this thread and I suspect the Hugo TT will appeal to a different buyer because of its small footprint as an integrated unit and less so as a standalone DAC. The 2Qute is a better comparison to the Yggdrasil.

Yep, at least in my testing, and especially with DAVE, there's a small, but discernible, loss in transparency when coupling the Chord units with an external amplifier.
 
Driving something like the HD800S ... I'd run that straight off the Chord unit's output ... all the way down to the Mojo.
 
I find I prefer the overall result with my Abyss and LCD-4 when feeding DAVE into my WA5-LE.  Definitely a small loss in transparency, but made up for elsewhere - for me at least!

 

[Torq]

  Torq is not fond of the sound signiture of the 2Qute. All of Rob's dacs, atleast from the Hugo forward, do not use a seperate headphone amplifier and instead use a variable line-out.  Mojo, Hugo, and Hugo TT output the same amount of power.

Yep, the 2Qute and Hugo sound identical to me (which, I suppose, they should) and I find them just lacking a little body/soul compared to Mojo, the TT or DAVE.   They might well be technical better than Mojo, but I prefer it's signature over the 2Qute and Hugo ... and the TT had, when I listened to it a similar signature to Mojo - but somehow better all around.
 
DAVE is a different kettle of fish! 

 

[rgs9200m]

OK, thanks for clarifying that about the TT. It sure sounds like the takeaway here is that the Yggdrasil and the PWD Junior are super-audiophile bargains (and I guess the Mojo too). Best to you again.