Schiit Happened: The Story of the World's Most Improbable Start-Up

[golfbravobravo]

I now have a system that I'm happy with (well for now ). The Freya+ is settling in well and is a permanent addition (so my brand new Freya will be for sale soon).

At the Canjam in Charlotte I met a couple of folks form the Research Triangle area to whom I promised an audition 'in situ', and carefully made a note of their names and contact info. Of course I have "misplaced" the note I wrote, so this is by way of a re-invite to come and sample Roon, Freya+, Vidar and Double Impacts. I know (I think???0 that Chris was a teacher and another person worked for the credit union in NC.

PM me if you are still interested!

Cheers

Grsham

 

[Ableza]

Yeah, I've thought about that a few times for bi-amping. I considered using a miniDSP nanoDIGI 2x8 as a digital crossover (resulting in four or more digital channels), then multiple DACs (two or more) into multiple power amps (two stereo amps or four mono blocks, or more) into speakers. But I'm wondering whether the timing is consistent between. Presumably they are slaved to the clock in the nanoDigi (or in the original scenario, the cheap HDMI > 8x S/PDIF converter), but I'm not sure whether that's good enough. A multi-channel DAC could keep the channels in sync with a shared clock.

Yes your concern is valid, although it would be fun to try...

 

[Alcophone]

Yes your concern is valid, although it would be fun to try...

Yes... especially if you want to use mono blocks... because then you need at least Gungnirs to get balanced out... and of course you might want to control the volume in the analog domain, so you add two Freya S controlled with the same remote...

 

[artur9]

... it would be tempting to do an all analog surround processor. "The only processor where you won't have to worry about future standards changes...ever."

Kal Rubinstein has repeatedly written about this need. https://www.stereophile.com/content/music-round-26-page-2

Modis are cheap enough you could stack up four of them for your 8-channel setup...

I asked for that before. @Baldr said never ever never ever would he ever want anything to do with HDMI again. I think one also needs some way to synchronize clocks across multiple DACs. I think the MiniDSP UDIO8 comes pretty close to this sort of thing. IIRC there's a Kal Rubinstein article about it using it in just that way.

 

[Alcophone]

Happy to report that Ragnarok 2 2 (the replacement unit) works as expected. No buzz in either channel, even on high gain.

That's customer service. When I had a headphone amp from a different company that, believe it or not, also had a buzzing issue, it took weeks to merely get a PCB that I had to install myself.
Schiit instead sent me a prepaid label to return the defective unit, and only waited until FedEx reported it had picked it up (from the facility I had dropped it off at the day before) before sending me a working replacement.
The aforementioned PCB from the other company instead got damaged in transit due to poor packaging.

For listening impressions I'll give myself and the amp some time to get used to each other.

 

[Rensek]

Yall heard it from the man himself. Email Schiit about things you want Schiit to do, and they will do it for us if enough of us ask for the same thing.

Now that that's been established let's all start emailing about the following.

Gumby Jr in a bifrost case.
Loki Max
A digital preamp.

Anything else your heart desires. Organize on headfi or somewhere else and get those emails rolling.

In regards to the Ragnarok discussion, that part of the design process must be hell on @Jason Stoddard - you are damned if do, damned if you don't. How many people use subs with Ragnarok. How many want headphones with subs (to me this is crazy, possibly crazy awesome) how many want speakers and subs, how many don't use subs, so it doesn't matter? As is human nature our beliefs and tendencies tend to be shaped by what people tell us or ask us. As an example, lately there has been lots of discussion (elsewhere) regarding the importance of Twitter, in regards to political trends. Sounds like most of America doesn't use it much, and the portion that doesn't tends to be the moderates, on both sides. So the lunatic lefties and ridiculous righties end up pushing opinion and policy. Twitter has an outsized influence... But they are the ones who speak up, so they get what they want...

I say toggles are the answer for uh rag 5 or something.

Example

Toggle for speakers on/off
Toggle for headphones on/off
Toggle for Preamps on/off
Toggle for Source
Toggle for Gain

Heres an idea for Jason, how about making a rag 2 power amp, without volume control, and without any module bays. Let us run it off of the preamps, the sagas and freyas of the world.

And then make everything toggle switches on the front, except for the power switch of course.

Id actually really like that...

 

[johnjen]

Although Schiit would use toggles to activate their relay based switching system, I have used 2 miniature toggle switches on the output of my 45 amp (one/channel) to select either speakers, or headphones, or to mute the outputs.
I can get away with this because the ground pounding ≈1.5w/ch this amp produces is WELL within the capacity of the 6 amp rated switches I used, and no relays are forever enslaved either.

Here is the glamor shot of the front panel, globe tubes in and ready to rock.


The switches are those really small toggles between the xlr connectors and the speaker binding posts.
They look so innocent and inconsequential…
hahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

Tonight I'll power it up for testing and tweaking all the various voltages.

JJ

 

[rkw]

Like I said, the only reason we did this is that we had a number of requests on the original Ragnarok to have the preamp outputs live with headphones. We retained this on Ragnarok 2, because you can turn either one on, both on, or all off.

Why not simply let the preamp output be always active (except mute)? It seems to me that speakers with preamp out should be a popular usage. It isn't intuitive that a customer would need to choose speaker+headphone mode instead.

 

[Alcophone]

Here is the glamor shot of the front panel, globe tubes in and ready to rock.

Looks like a knight! You shall call it Sir Dancelot!


For those of you worried about Lightdims going out of business because of Jason's market disruption in the form of light pipes, fear not!





What is this gain switch you speak of?

 

[johnjen]

Looks like a knight! You shall call it Sir Dancelot!

snip

Or perhaps Sir Blinds-a-lot…
I'm not sure I would survive if I took it out in direct sunlight, at least not with out a welders helmet on…
hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

And the similarity is more than just shiney-shiney, as this 'suit of encapsulation' was also hand pounded into shape…

JJ

 

[scottbrown5271]

Hey all,

...And I hear you on the effects loop, but there's no space for it. It is interesting that Nexus will work for balanced equalization, though (without having to double the number of inductors and capacitors). That's something I'll be exploring in the future...

Thanks, Jason.

There is plenty of room in Ragnarok 2, and with that addition I have a use case for that device today... When I look at Ragnarok the Concept, it is an all-in-one, do everything amp in principal. Rag1 was thermally constrained, and really filled up the box. Closed box at that; done and done, does what it does. Rag2? Wow. The constraints are lifted a bit. Plenty of room to expand on the meaning of "do everything amp." How about expanding the concept to Swiss Army Knife. If it starts to get crowded in there, giant wall-wart anyone?

 

[Ultimateaudioslave]

Yall heard it from the man himself. Email Schiit about things you want Schiit to do, and they will do it for us if enough of us ask for the same thing.

Now that that's been established let's all start emailing about the following.

Gumby Jr in a bifrost case.
Loki Max
A digital preamp.

Anything else your heart desires. Organize on headfi or somewhere else and get those emails rolling.

In regards to the Ragnarok discussion, that part of the design process must be hell on @Jason Stoddard - you are damned if do, damned if you don't. How many people use subs with Ragnarok. How many want headphones with subs (to me this is crazy, possibly crazy awesome) how many want speakers and subs, how many don't use subs, so it doesn't matter? As is human nature our beliefs and tendencies tend to be shaped by what people tell us or ask us. As an example, lately there has been lots of discussion (elsewhere) regarding the importance of Twitter, in regards to political trends. Sounds like most of America doesn't use it much, and the portion that doesn't tends to be the moderates, on both sides. So the lunatic lefties and ridiculous righties end up pushing opinion and policy. Twitter has an outsized influence... But they are the ones who speak up, so they get what they want...

I say toggles are the answer for uh rag 5 or something.

Example

Toggle for speakers on/off
Toggle for headphones on/off
Toggle for Preamps on/off
Toggle for Source
Toggle for Gain

Heres an idea for Jason, how about making a rag 2 power amp, without volume control, and without any module bays. Let us run it off of the preamps, the sagas and freyas of the world.

And then make everything toggle switches on the front, except for the power switch of course.

Id actually really like that...

Thanks for putting out this trend. I really wanted a decent quality CD player on the rag 2 stuck to the top plate. If there is a decent quality cd player, nothing gets better than that.

 

[scottbrown5271]

Thanks for putting out this trend. I really wanted a decent quality CD player on the rag 2 stuck to the top plate. If there is a decent quality cd player, nothing gets better than that.

Could that be a proprietary interface along the lines of the discussions in @Baldr's thread? Like I said, Ragnarok as a Swiss Army knife, an audio playground for the overly obsessed on a budget...

 

[Snowpuppy77]

Could that be a proprietary interface along the lines of the discussions in @Baldr's thread? Like I said, Ragnarok as a Swiss Army knife, an audio playground for the overly obsessed on a budget...

To me it is it is better than a swiss army knife because it does not just do both but it excels at both speakers and headphones at the price point and power rating. My Ragnarok 1 replaced some NAD separates I have. Just plain sounds better in my system.

 

[scottbrown5271]

To me it is it is better than a swiss army knife because it does not just do both but it excels at both speakers and headphones at the price point and power rating. My Ragnarok 1 replaced some NAD separates I have. Just plain sounds better in my system.

Point taken, like WAY betterer.