[tonykaz]

Carver Cube ,
I was around for that test , it was gamey to say the least , 50-50 result , one and only one time , slam bam thank you mam , a business launching ad campaign already prepared , took the world of High Fidelty Magazene readership by storm , dealers getting on-board post-haste ! , a marketing coup !!!!!   
Are you a believer ?  
Penn & Teller do this sort of thing in their Vegas Show . 
Where are those Carvers today ?
Is Bob Carver the designer of any of your stuff ? , if not , why not ?  
It was a dark day in home audio's history but it gave HP's the Absolute Sound & Audio Research a wide field to cultivate , so , it wasn't all bad . 
 
Tony in Michigan 

 

[Bazile]

Where are those Carvers today ?
Is Bob Carver the designer of any of your stuff ?
 
Mine is in my son's system. I purchased a Carver receiver sometime around 1980. It replaced a Sansui 4 channel, and sounded great until my older boy went to college, and needed music. He still uses it, and it sounds great when I visit.  Isn't a negative comment about Carver in a Schiit forum a bit ad hominem ish?
 
Baz
 
 
 
The receiver was probably bought in 1985..not 1980

 

[tonykaz]

Hello Baz ,
 
Yes , you're right , sorry .
 
Tony in Michigan 
 
ps.  is that Carver as nice as the Channel Island ? ,  the CI stuff seems to have a deserved Halo surrounding it .  I too own the HD580s and am quite taken with Sennheiser Company and their products , not that I want to be seen as recomending Non-Schiit Products on this site !  

 

[Bazile]

I'll have to edit my post a bit..
 
It must have been 1985 or so when I got the Carver...the rest is right. My bad. The Channel Islands stuff sounds great to me, but I have to admit to being a fan boy. I still have Audio Alchemy stuff that sounds great to me.
 
Baz

 

[Puma Cat]

Regarding DSD and the Loki chapter...
 
Quote:

<SNIP all that stuff before...> So What About the Future
 
Okay. Let’s say the next Sony reorganization (they ain’t exactly healthy these days) doesn’t kill DSD, but results in them releasing 20,000 DSD recordings of popular artists, all with DSD-guaranteed-from-the-start provenance, for, say, $5.99 an album.
 
Would this result in a whole lot of DSD out there? You bet.
 
Would it be a game-changer? Absolutely.
 
Would it have us dusting off plans for a Loki 2, or working on ways to include DSD decoding in our DACs without compromise? Yeppers.
 
But I think that scenario is about as likely as the disembodied head of Steve Jobs giving the next Apple Keynote.
 
What’s more likely is this:
 

1. DSD recordings will continue to be a small part of the market
2. DSD recordings that actually start as DSD, or were converted direct to DSD from master tapes, will be an even tinier part of the market
3. High-rate DSD with the same provenance will be even smaller
4. DSD recordings will continue to be very expensive
5. Some people will continue to really like DSD, and will flip us off as they pass us at shows
6. More people won’t care, as long as the music sounds good and doesn’t cost a fortune
7. Even more people won’t care if it’s DSD, PCM, or compressed, as long as it’s available to download at a good price
8. And the vast majority of people will never have any idea what the hell us crazy audiophiles are talking about, as they happily stream compressed music for a small monthly fee (or free)
9. About 10 years from now, a new quantum-based encoding format will come out so that everyone can buy their music again…

 
How about we deal with the elephant in the room, before worrying about formats, hmm?

 
So, I'll play the part of the gadfly here...there's one in every crowd, right? 
 
I'm probably (as Jason remembered when I mentioned it to him at RMAF in 2013) one of the very first persons to get a Loki, or at least in Californina. IIRC, it was announced on a Monday or Tuesday or something like that, and I ordered it the day it was announced. IIRC, it was available for shipment immediately when it was first announced. I had it in my hands about two days later (I live in NorCal). 
 
Turns out, I REALLY like, no love, my Loki. I think it sounds fantastic. I think I wrote Jason an email the evening I got it, and basically mentioned that I was completely blown away about how good it sounded. For $149, it's performance was just ridiculously good. Yeah, I had to get a second USB cable for it, I picked up a used Audioquest Coffee for less than half price (great-sounding USB cable, and YES, they do make a difference), and also connected it to Gungnir with a set of interconnects. 
 
Started buying content off Super Hi-Res at the same time. I can't speak to the provenance of the titles, but I was buying content that was orignally sold by Analogue Productions as SACDs, so my assumption was they started from a DSD recording. 
 
While I don't have a lot of titles, the ones that I have dupes of, that is, 24/192 PCM vs DSD of the same title, I invariably prefer the DSD recordings. They sound more natural and analog-like. 
That's on the whole, I have some really nice PCM titles (e.g. the newest HDTracks 24/192 Miles KOB) that are superb, so yes, the mastering of either format really does matter.
 
But at the end of the day, though, I really like having the choice. And most times, If I've got a nice DSD recording, I prefer to listen to it rather than the PCM version. For example, the Shelby Lynne Just A Little Lovin' DSD from Super Hi-Res is truly spectacular. Yeah, I have to press a switch and reset Audirvana, but it's not a problem....for the money it's a great solution for me, and I'm glad Schiit created that little trickster god of DSD, Loki.
 
Stephen Scharf aka Puma Cat. 

 

[sagittarius1273]

Just curious..when wyrd produces an improvement,is its effect the same whether it is connected to a laptop running on battery power or on mains power?

 

[nicolo]

The Wyrd cannot be powered by a laptop. It has a wall-wart to power it from mains power. It takes the USB data, reclocks it and sends the data signal only to a USB DAC, along with the rectified power form the AC wall-wart.

 

[x838nwy]

meanwhile on my desk:
 

 

[sagittarius1273]

Hello nicolo..i understand..i was referring to how the laptop is powered not the wyrd

 

[bearFNF]

Your missing one amp.
But it's still a nice stack-o-SCHIIT you have piled up there.

 

[BackToAnalogue]

Er guys do you realise that when you say it 're-clocks it', that is the exactly same thing as saying that it reads the sample (or packet of samples) from its input buffer and then writes it straight to its output buffer. In data comms that action is effectively re-clocking and that is all they mean. For Asynch this adds a delay which doesn't matter for audio but does for AV. (For Synchronous it would add another potential source of jitter). It may also be a good workaround for some of the gliches in the device handlers and drivers supplied by our good friends at Microsoft or by other DAC manufacturers who are also struggling with getting their heads around having to deal with software.

In Asynch any clocking that is necessary in the comms bits and pieces is just processor clocking for the read buffer firmware etc, and does not pass on jitter effects to the digital filter. The digital filter uses its own clock, like all CPUs, and it knows the sample rate it is processing and, as long as there is another sample ready to process each time it decides that it needs one, then the only source of jitter is the processor clock itself vs the clocking of the original sample. And I can't get my head round why that should be a problem because it is so small, but I understand that it is a critical part of the design to get right.

The big problem with Asynchronous is that everything in the chain needs to be running much faster than with Synchronous. Every component needs to spend the majority of its time in an idle state so that it is ready for the next packet of data because it doesn't know when it is going to arrive. And that is probably why some DACs still perform better with SPDIF, because they aren't quite fast enough for Asynch USB at 192 but they are plenty fast enough for SPDIF at 192.

This is not a criticism. We are talking about 192,000 data packets every second or up to 10Mb/s. Back in the 1980s I was working on process control systems with a lot of semi real time Asynchronous comms to things called (Programmable Logic Controllers) PLCs or Outstations which capture plant data and output control signals (both digital and analogue) . The fastest we operated at on the computer side was 1 sample per second (but mostly one a minute) and I think (though can't remember) that PLCs could go up to 100 readings per second but not for all of their analogue inputs. So if you had told me that in thirty years time we would be able to receive data at 100Mb/s Asynchronously over a home cable connection using pretty much the same wire and that we would have a D to A converter which could process nearly 200,000 samples a second. I would have said that you had been reading too much Izaac Azimov and should try some F Scott Fitzgerald or John Steinbeck for a change.

It is not surprising that this stuff has teething problems, but it will work properly and reliably quite soon, everything always does these days. At the moment any of us trying to use USB 2.0 (or 3.0 which I use as far as I can) with a DAC at 192KHz are really beta testers. And if you try and do it with Ethernet then you find that you are almost a developer. Happy Days.

 

[Ableza]

Thus why Jason wrote "it shouldn't make a difference but it does." 

 

[StefanJK]

  Thus why Jason wrote "it shouldn't make a difference but it does."

Which is, I believe, not the end of the story.

 

[senorx12562]

  I have one of these…
http://www.audioexcellenceaz.com/products/audiodharma-cable-cooker-cable-conditioner/
 
With the usb adapters…
 
This is a heavy duty 'industrial strength' cooker when compared to the cd versions etc.
 
I have found that 'cooking' the cables brings out a whole nuther level of inner detail, especially the very bottom of the bass (the last several octaves).
 
In my experiments on my system, it was only after cooking my Shunyata power cables where the very bottom end of the bass finally turned 'on'.   I wouldn't have purchased them if they didn't deliver the bass that I knew was there, because my home made ac cables (also cooked) let me know it was there.
 
On the usb cables, it allowed the delivery of that much more inner detail, enough so that I now use usb instead of cat7.
 
Yeah some people swear by, while others swear at, these sorts of tweaks.
I'm willing to investigate, and determine if these 'voo-doo' enhancements actually help my system, or not.
 
JJ 

OMG, I need to go back to Sound Science where I belong.

 

[Ableza]

  Which is, I believe, not the end of the story.

True, Jason has a couple more chapters to post.