[valiant66]

After researching reviews, price point, features, and looks I decided on the Audiolab. Great SQ with coax through the RME DAC. It has played even some questionably scratched discs with it's read-ahead buffer. And I think it looks good with the Freya S. Notice my electrical tape triangle of black for the volume marking...

I'm thinking a Bifrost 2 or a Yggdrasil would look good in this stack one day. Then I'd move the RME into my headphone setup. I've got some HD6XXs on the way currently.

Starting to design a wood cabinet for my system to house all of my Schiit and looking forward to the project with my dad who is 85 and has a 2-car garage wood shop.

Thanks for that photo! It quite nicely shows how the Freya size compares to a "normal" hi-fi component.
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[yonson]

My Oppo is a lowly BDP-93 and folks on Ebay are asking a huge amount of money for a 9-10 year old disc spinner. Crazy. I wonder if the trend will continue now that Oppo is out of the business.



It must depend on where you live. The package that I ordered last night at 8:00PM got here less than 19 hours after clicking 'buy'. I live less than 5 miles from one of their distribution centers.

WOW, that's how it used to be for me. There's a DC like 15 - 20 miles from here as well, but the quickest I've gotten anything the last month or so has been 5 days, but most have been taking about a week. I got some stuff I ordered last Saturday today.

 

[RickB]

WOW, that's how it used to be for me. There's a DC like 15 - 20 miles from here as well, but the quickest I've gotten anything the last month or so has been 5 days, but most have been taking about a week. I got some stuff I ordered last Saturday today.

FWIW, I ordered something last night that has a delivery date of next Saturday. Sometimes they come early, though.

My local Target has more things in stock than Amazon has for the past month and a half.

 

[valiant66]

--snip--

The proposed Schiit transport will be the fourth or fifth transport I have been involved with over the last thirty or so years. It will be absolutely compatible with all future Schiit digital products. Of all things digital, I am certain about the following sentence. Paramount to optimum performance/listening are antiseptically clean clocks. We have many source devices such as ethernet to USB devices, transports, and sundry other components. Well and good. What few or none consider is the fact that by far the most important location for clean clocks and data is right at the DAC chip itself – the ass end of the converter. (Destination clocks) The farther the clean clock goes back in the reproduction toward the source, the less it matters. Clean clocks still matter at the source, but all to frequently rapidly approach triviality. Destination clocks rule.

So at some point in our Schiit, newer products and upgrades for our higher end products will feature the best, rock solid clocks at our DACs where they kick the most ass. What does this have to do with a transport? Well, we can use an enhanced BWD connection controlling jitter all the way back to the transport even through an async USB connection as well as BWD.

--snip--

What I take from this is that if the CD transport uses a clock next to the DAC ( a 'destination clock') the Transport machanism makes very little difference.
That's why I have been holding out for Mike's CD Transport.

What I take away from it is that the transport won't work its special sauce with existing Schiit hardware, or anyone else's hardware. It'll just be another "genero" transport, to quote Mike, with, I assume, genero performance, unless it's hooked up to one of Schiit's not-yet-working-in-32-bit, still-being-redesigned, release-date-unknown new DACs with the special clock bolted onto the back of the processor.

The implications are staggering if you think about it. Every one of Schiit's DACs will need to be redesigned to include a BWD connection (what does BWD stand for, btw?), and every DAC board redesigned with the new clock. There will have to be new decoder boards for the Yggy. New plug-in boards for the Jot etc.
All to support an as-yet unconfirmed transport for obsolete media. (In fairness it sounds like the clock is in the works no matter what.)

The takeaway is simple: unless you are prepared to update your DAC hardware at the same time as you buy Schiit's new transport, don't bother holding out for it. Get something good now, and enjoy.
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[valiant66]

WOW, that's how it used to be for me. There's a DC like 15 - 20 miles from here as well, but the quickest I've gotten anything the last month or so has been 5 days, but most have been taking about a week. I got some stuff I ordered last Saturday today.

I ordered a Raspberry Pi kit last week and it was delivered the same day. The day before I ordered a pair of sneakers and a bunch of other assorted stuff, and each individual item came up with a different delivery date, some as far out as May 11th. 7 different packages. Crazy times.

I'm in Calgary, AB, Canada, fwiw.
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[StevePNW]

My Oppo is a lowly BDP-93 and folks on Ebay are asking a huge amount of money for a 9-10 year old disc spinner. Crazy. I wonder if the trend will continue now that Oppo is out of the business.



It must depend on where you live. The package that I ordered last night at 8:00PM got here less than 19 hours after clicking 'buy'. I live less than 5 miles from one of their distribution centers.

I have a BDP-93 in my living room setup. It's been a great universal player. Even decodes my HDCD discs like my NAD C 542. The Oppo is built like a tank. I looked at Ebay and see what you are saying. Prices all over the map but it looks like you could recover most or all of the original investment!

 

[tincanear]

What I take away from it is that the transport won't work its special sauce with existing Schiit hardware, or anyone else's hardware. It'll just be another "genero" transport, to quote Mike, with, I assume, genero performance, unless it's hooked up to one of Schiit's not-yet-working-in-32-bit, still-being-redesigned, release-date-unknown new DACs with the special clock bolted onto the back of the processor.

The implications are staggering if you think about it. Every one of Schiit's DACs will need to be redesigned to include a BWD connection (what does BWD stand for, btw?), and every DAC board redesigned with the new clock. There will have to be new decoder boards for the Yggy. New plug-in boards for the Jot etc.
All to support an as-yet unconfirmed transport for obsolete media. (In fairness it sounds like the clock is in the works no matter what.)

The takeaway is simple: unless you are prepared to update your DAC hardware at the same time as you buy Schiit's new transport, don't bother holding out for it. Get something good now, and enjoy.
.

As I read it, it implied that the Schiit transport would have both USB and BWD interfaces, and a Schiit DAC equipped with either Unison or BWD would provide the DAC clock timing back to the transport.

 

[tincanear]

Almost all OEM disc reader mechanisms sold today already have that capability; otherwise you wouldn't be able to rip a CD at faster than 1X speed. Moreover, data blocks are not "questionable" — the data encoding used in audio CD ensures that data blocks are either retrieved bit perfect, or unreadable (which can trigger a re-read).

(edited)
yes, I know that its common for computer disc readers to read at much faster than 1x speed, with one advantage that re-reads are possible when encountering marginal data blocks when ripping to an HDD or SSD.

Unfortunately, sony / Philips only included a parity bit, instead of CRC (error recovery) bits in the redbook specification for each 32-bit (24-bits audio data max plus preamble and control bits) sample, so single-bit errors cannot be corrected on the fly and require discarding the sample or re-reading.

 

[valiant66]

(edited)
yes, I know that its common for computer disc readers to read at much faster than 1x speed, with one advantage that re-reads are possible when encountering marginal data blocks when ripping to an HDD or SSD.

Unfortunately, sony / Philips only included a parity bit, instead of CRC (error recovery) bits in the redbook specification for each 32-bit (24-bits audio data max plus preamble and control bits) sample, so single-bit errors cannot be corrected on the fly and require discarding the sample or re-reading.

If I recall correctly the player read it multiple times and compared each read to discard those single bit errors. but as I said, I wasn't paying close enough attention to the review...
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[Jason Stoddard]

Hey guys,

Ask Mike for more details on the transport, but I think I'm safe in sharing that there's no BWD in it. Unison USB has surpassed that, no need for BWD anymore.

Don't expect the transport to be super-cheap, if that's what you're looking for, though we're not talking car-like prices (like other transports that use some of our mechanicals cost.)

Do expect it to be a game-changer in what you can expect from a transport.

And do expect it this year.

That's all for now. Best to bug Mike for more, though I wanted to squash some speculation before some very very very old ideas are taken as gospel.

Sorry to be scarce, we're very busy right now. I finished up the Utah stuff last week, and next week we may even have a new product for you. Lots of the stuff we've been doing around here have been ensuring we can continue to operate seamlessly in our new crisis culture (not just sales, but support and service as well). Not only have we done that, we are moving ahead on new products, a couple of which will be announced soon.

All the best,
Jason

 

[Jason Stoddard]

Aaannndd...with respect to Amazon, I don't think they are going to come out of this crisis in a better position. They've taken away one of the primary reasons people purchase from Amazon--rapid shipping--and are attracting huge flak for their employee and business development policies. In addition, it is almost literally impossible to tell where something is coming from (country of origin).

We'll see how this ends up working out, but, bottom line, all the rules are changing, everything you expected is no longer certain, and there's gonna be a ton of change...for both good and ill...after we get through this. I'll share more once the smoke clears.

This is a very weird time.

 

[brooksgraham]

(edited)
yes, I know that its common for computer disc readers to read at much faster than 1x speed, with one advantage that re-reads are possible when encountering marginal data blocks when ripping to an HDD or SSD.

Unfortunately, sony / Philips only included a parity bit, instead of CRC (error recovery) bits in the redbook specification for each 32-bit (24-bits audio data max plus preamble and control bits) sample, so single-bit errors cannot be corrected on the fly and require discarding the sample or re-reading.

If I remember correctly, the Red Book CD standard mandates cross interleaved Reed-Solomon error correction at the media encoding. Significantly more advanced than a parity bit.

But then again, the last time that I read the Red Book was in 1982. Human memory can be faulty.

 

[valiant66]

Don't expect the transport to be super-cheap, if that's what you're looking for, though we're not talking car-like prices (like other transports that use some of our mechanicals cost.)

I just hope it comes in a Bifrost-width case....

Sorry to be scarce, we're very busy right now. I finished up the Utah stuff last week, and next week we may even have a new product for you. Lots of the stuff we've been doing around here have been ensuring we can continue to operate seamlessly in our new crisis culture (not just sales, but support and service as well). Not only have we done that, we are moving ahead on new products, a couple of which will be announced soon

Considering your history, it's not surprising, but it's still impressive and encouraging to watch nimble companies react to these crazy times.

It's good to hear you're looking after your staff and still moving ahead. Kudos.
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[rkw]

Unfortunately, sony / Philips only included a parity bit, instead of CRC (error recovery) bits in the redbook specification for each 32-bit (24-bits audio data max plus preamble and control bits) sample, so single-bit errors cannot be corrected on the fly and require discarding the sample or re-reading.

Redbook format has very sophisticated error detection and recovery. If single-bit errors occur, they likely came afterwards, from a memory buffer or data bus. The data written on the disc is not a stream of audio bits. The audio data is encoded and interleaved and written as redundant data frames. When the disc is damaged and a frame is unreadable, the original bit-perfect audio can still be reconstructed from other frames.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Disc_Digital_Audio#Data_encoding

This stream of audio frames, as a whole, is then subjected to CIRC encoding, which segments and rearranges the data and expands it with error correction codes in a way that allows occasional read errors to be detected and corrected. CIRC encoding interleaves the audio frames throughout the disc over several consecutive frames so that the information will be more resistant to burst errors. Therefore, a physical frame on the disc will actually contain information from multiple logical audio frames. This process adds 64 bits of error correction data to each frame. After this, 8 bits of subcode or subchannel data are added to each of these encoded frames, which is used for control and addressing when playing the CD.​

 

[Jason Stoddard]

I just hope it comes in a Bifrost-width case....

Not a chance, it won't fit.