[Pietro Cozzi Tinin]

My Parasound Halo A23 weighs 28 pounds, take a look inside it. Vidar at 25 pounds and only 9 inches wide, that is truly impressive! I know it's an iron core and all, still how it all fits in there is amazing. It's been a long wait but will be worth it I'm sure. I just feel bad for Cozzi's freight bill!

I will survive. No Sweat. My problems only begin when Constanza likes it to sleep on the warm dubbel Vidar bed.

 

[Thouston]

Got my balanced cables and speaker cables today. All I need is the pair of Vidars! (And of course the pair of speakers...)

What brand of balanced interconnects did you get?

 

[Aaron Shi]

What brand of balanced interconnects did you get?

Blue Jeans Cable AES/EBU Balanced Audio Cable, from Amazon.

 

[MOFOfunk]

Reading this: https://www.watfordvalves.com/pdfs/guitaristv02-01_biasing.pdf
I found the following explanation very funny:
"A valve is made up of a minimum of four component parts: the heater, cathode, grid and plate. They are all housed in a sealed, airless vacuum and this is why the Americans call them vacuum tubes."
...
"By varying the negative grid bias the technician can correctly set up your amp for maximum performance, thus ensuring that the valve is operating correctly. The valve therefore operates literally as a ’valve’ regulating the current flow from the cathode to the plate – that’s why in England we call
it a valve."

Does Saga and Freya adjust the negative grid bias automatically? Or is that not necessary if we stick to the tube types specified in the manual?

 

[DSNORD]

Jason,

I think the thing I love the most about you is that you have the balls and the humbleness to fess up to when you bozo something up. A mad genius who can laugh at himself and share his humanness with his customers and not worry about negative repercussions.

Unfortunately in my medical field, we've been taught that admitting an error is the sign of weakness and a huge setup for a bazillion dollar lawsuit. You don't want your colleagues, and especially the hospital and insurance regulators, to be looking at you sideways with scrutiny and disdain, and you certainly don't want to chum the waters for the blood sucking lawyer sharks, so you hide those errors no matter how inconsequential, and nobody really ever gets to learn anything from them to put new measures in place for actual improvement.

And yet the best docs with the best practices I have ever known are those who exemplify your ethics and ideals as I interpret them.

We could use a few thousand of you on our side!!!!!

 

[Pandahead]

So, I went to listen to a prototype last night at the house, and I needed a source (I usually use a Fulla 2 or Jotunheim these days, which, yeah, are sources, but I wanted a multibit source). Luckily I had my trusty Bifrost Multibit hanging around. So I hooked that up, plugged it into my Surface Pro with USB, and got...nothin. USB wasn't even detected.

Thinking this might be a Windows problem (though W10, in general, has been really no problem, even in advance of their UAC2 driver), I tried it on my MacBook Pro. Nothin.

****, well, yeah, sometimes the USB boards just die, and who knew what I had in the Bifrost. I didn't have a non-USB source handy, so I shelved the listening session to tomorrow, figuring I'd bring in the Bifrost Multibit and swap out the USB card.

And when I got the Bifrost to the office, I found this.



Yeah. That's a 1.0 Bifrost board, with a 1.0 non-Uber 4399 board, with some bizarre, green-board, hand-soldered USB Gen 1 pre-prototype. Looking at it again, I realized this wasn't my Bifrost Multibit at all...it was an ancient Bifrost I'd been using at the old Odeon office for optical input only. The serial number? 11.

Now, If I can just find my Bifrost Multibit...

Jason, it's 11:00 PM here in Florida, if you still haven't found a mutibit dac to take home let me know so I can overnight you one of mine. We want to know how things go. Like... will you need a fire extinguisher if you really crank Diana Krall??? Cheers and good work as always.

 

[OldRoadToad]

So, I went to listen to a prototype last night at the house, and I needed a source (I usually use a Fulla 2 or Jotunheim these days, which, yeah, are sources, but I wanted a multibit source). Luckily I had my trusty Bifrost Multibit hanging around. So I hooked that up, plugged it into my Surface Pro with USB, and got...nothin. USB wasn't even detected.

Thinking this might be a Windows problem (though W10, in general, has been really no problem, even in advance of their UAC2 driver), I tried it on my MacBook Pro. Nothin.

****, well, yeah, sometimes the USB boards just die, and who knew what I had in the Bifrost. I didn't have a non-USB source handy, so I shelved the listening session to tomorrow, figuring I'd bring in the Bifrost Multibit and swap out the USB card.

And when I got the Bifrost to the office, I found this.



Yeah. That's a 1.0 Bifrost board, with a 1.0 non-Uber 4399 board, with some bizarre, green-board, hand-soldered USB Gen 1 pre-prototype. Looking at it again, I realized this wasn't my Bifrost Multibit at all...it was an ancient Bifrost I'd been using at the old Odeon office for optical input only. The serial number? 11.

Now, If I can just find my Bifrost Multibit...

I can assure you that I do not have it.

ORT

 

[Jason Stoddard]

Reading this: https://www.watfordvalves.com/pdfs/guitaristv02-01_biasing.pdf
I found the following explanation very funny:
"A valve is made up of a minimum of four component parts: the heater, cathode, grid and plate. They are all housed in a sealed, airless vacuum and this is why the Americans call them vacuum tubes."
...
"By varying the negative grid bias the technician can correctly set up your amp for maximum performance, thus ensuring that the valve is operating correctly. The valve therefore operates literally as a ’valve’ regulating the current flow from the cathode to the plate – that’s why in England we call
it a valve."

Does Saga and Freya adjust the negative grid bias automatically? Or is that not necessary if we stick to the tube types specified in the manual?

Like all of our tube amps, the operating point is set with a constant current source--no need to twiddle with adjustments.

 

[Jason Stoddard]

Jason,

I think the thing I love the most about you is that you have the balls and the humbleness to fess up to when you bozo something up. A mad genius who can laugh at himself and share his humanness with his customers and not worry about negative repercussions.

Unfortunately in my medical field, we've been taught that admitting an error is the sign of weakness and a huge setup for a bazillion dollar lawsuit. You don't want your colleagues, and especially the hospital and insurance regulators, to be looking at you sideways with scrutiny and disdain, and you certainly don't want to chum the waters for the blood sucking lawyer sharks, so you hide those errors no matter how inconsequential, and nobody really ever gets to learn anything from them to put new measures in place for actual improvement.

And yet the best docs with the best practices I have ever known are those who exemplify your ethics and ideals as I interpret them.

We could use a few thousand of you on our side!!!!!

Believe it or not, I understand both sides. I think it's natural to admit mistakes, fix them, and move on (it was really, really irritating standing there, showing everyone how to put together a Vidar, and realizing "holy crap, if I'd made this one simple part, it'd be 100X easier,") but sometimes it's hard to un-learn start-up truisms (like, "get the stuff that's standard and on the shelf,") and replace them with new realities, like, "Well, when you're planning on making tens to hundreds of thousands of products, tool that damn thing up!" The reality is that it will only affect production, and it will only affect it one time (serviceability is unchanged), and it really wouldn't be a big deal if we were planning on, say, making 1000 total pieces of the product. But when you go up 20X or 50X from that, the economics change.

But then again, my mistakes don't kill people. That's where a lot of the paranoia in healthcare comes from. So I understand the CYA mentality. But yeah, it's frustrating (from the patient side) to be told, "Well, we can't do X until we try Y, because that's the standard of care," even if X might be (a) ineffective, (b) loaded with side effects, or (c) dangerous. Or (d) even if Y is what we really think you need, or (e) even if you, personally, can afford to skip to Y. You have to put a check-box on each step, or yeah, someone is gonna uncover it if things go wrong, and then you're in a world of hurt.

I literally just sat with a friend today--the husband of a Schiit employee--while his cardiologist said, "Yep, you're gonna have to have bypasses, and you've gotta do it now." Disregarding the fact he feels fine, and has been living a very active, athletic lifestyle with 100% blockage of one artery for who knows how long (for those of you wondering how he could have 100% blockage and not be dead, look up "collateral coronary arteries.") Now, I am about as far from a doctor as you can be, and yeah, CABG is the standard of care, but, you know...would it be worth seeing if there were alternatives that would allow him to go for the new robotic procedures they're developing that don't require the sternum cracking, or even the new bypass-in-place stuff they're just starting to do? The insistence on "now, now, now"...I wonder how much of it is just "ticking the box to make sure all the paperwork is in order to avoid your "blood sucking lawyer sharks."

(Please note that this isn't a free invitation to go bonkers-medical-conspiracy-theory here in the comments. I have plenty of experience with both alternative and conventional medicine. And my experience is that both have merit.)

 

[wink]

..... as long as you survive the experience........... relatively unscathed.........

 

[Pietro Cozzi Tinin]

Ordered the Yggy today.
Now it's sleepless nights until I have it in.

 

[hornytoad]

Ordered the Yggy today.
Now it's sleepless nights until I have it in.

An amazing dac . Make sure it's always on . Mine kept improving for weeks

 

[acguitar84]

Ordered the Yggy today.
Now it's sleepless nights until I have it in.

You'll love the yggy! I just got my Freya yesterday, and I'm "not so patiently" waiting for my Lynx soundcard (UPS delivery) so I run my Yggy with AES/EBU.

 

[Pietro Cozzi Tinin]

You'll love the yggy! I just got my Freya yesterday, and I'm "not so patiently" waiting for my Lynx soundcard (UPS delivery) so I run my Yggy with AES/EBU.

My Yggi will be fed by the Cambridge 851N trough AES/EBU and then balanced to the Ragnarok.
I think there will nothing left to wish for.
Depending on what the Eitr is for and the MP's functions of course.......

 

[Pandahead]

Ordered the Yggy today.
Now it's sleepless nights until I have it in.

You will be amazed what it unlocks from ordinary old fashion CD resolution. Plus Constanza will help keep it at purrrrfect operating termperature on wintery days.