[Erratic Gravy]

In my family it was traditional at Christmas for all the grandkids to gather with excitement on the second floor so that Grandpa could lead us downstairs at 5 a.m. and ... IT'S PAST 5 AM AND WHERE THE FREAK IS SANTA that's all I'm saying.

I'm wondering if Jason is still using the Julian Calendar and missed the memo about that Gregorian one that the rest of us use !!!!

 

[ArmchairPhilosopher]

In my family it was traditional at Christmas for all the grandkids to gather with excitement on the second floor so that Grandpa could lead us downstairs at 5 a.m. and ... IT'S PAST 5 AM AND WHERE THE FREAK IS SANTA that's all I'm saying.

Worse; I grew up in Germany, where the handing out of presents happens on the evening of Christmas Eve. So, HE'S A DAY LATE is all I'm saying.

 

[classfolkphile]

That hurts my heart

Because it is an abomination!?

Yes, agreed. But it is funny.

 

[rfernand]

 

[US Blues]

 

[CAPT Deadpool]

Urd is coming just in time for Prime Day! (the made up holiday that is "celebrated" on two days)

I'm trying to decide whether to get just an Urd or an Urd and a Lyr+, both for my desk at work. I listen exclusively to CDs there...

Because it is an abomination!?

Funny that car doesn't look possessed by Baron Vladimir Harkonnen (or Putin). The Urd must flow.

 

[Randolf711]

https://www.schiit.com/products/urd
It’s ALIVE!

 

[yonson]

I hope it's a rug pull and something other than URD is launched hehe.

 

[scotdouglas]

THANK YOU
THANK YOU
THANK YOU

 

[Kapazza]

I noticed there's no micro SD card slot on the Urd. Is firmware updatable via USB-C or do you need to open the case to update it?

EDIT: Also noticed the silver price in the press release is wrong - should be $1,349.

 

[DennisLL]

Another silver one is gone.

 

[Jason Stoddard]

2023 Chapter 8
Rebooting the CD

I’ll admit it: I was a late convert to the Urd.

How late? As in, after years of development, during which I watched in mild interest as Mike and Dave and Ivana overcame problem after problem, shook my head as Elvis and the production team wrestled with the production challenges, and wondered at the rabid questions from our fans—asking, “when Urd? How’s it going? Got an estimate? Want Urd now!”, I finally took an Urd home so I could write the manual for it, and in an evening, went to a stark raving Urd aficionado.

I’m keeping this one. You ain’t getting it. Pry it from my cold dead hands and all that.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. You might be interested in the entire story of how this extremely improbable product got conceived, developed, debugged, designed and ordered, planned and supply-chained, and, finally, produced.

Because it’s a long road. Partly because we didn’t fully understand the complexity of the product when we started, partly due to some dead ends, partly due to supply chain disruptions, partly due to the difficulty of bringing it all together.

No kidding, Urd is the most complex and ambitious product we’ve made to date.

Looks Simple. Isn’t.

“Complex and ambitious?” you ask. “It’s a CD player.”

Actually no, it’s not that.

You’re doubtful. “What do you mean? You put a CD in, and it plays it.”

Well, ah, no. As in, if you expect it to output an analog signal like a typical CD player, you’re gonna be disappointed. Because Urd is, among other things, a CD transport, which means it only has digital output. You still need to add the DAC of your choice to get analog. And a preamp and amp or integrated amp and speakers to make a whole system.

But maybe it would be best to talk about what Urd is, just a bit. Urd is:

• A CD transport. As in, put in a CD and hit play. It’ll output SPDIF digital audio from its coax and AES jacks. Snore. There are plenty of products that do this. Not exciting.
• A CD transport that outputs via USB. Aha. Now Urd is a one-and-only product. It’s the only standalone non-computer device that you can stick a CD in and then plug a USB output into your USB DAC. Getting more interesting, right?
• A USB switcher. Urd also has two USB inputs, which takes it into total wackyland. Why would a CD transport need USB inputs? Because you can plug in a streamer and a computer, or a phone and a tablet, or any combo of those, and switch those USB sources to the USB output mentioned above.
• A USB-SPDIF converter. As in, those two inputs can also be converted to coax and AES as well. So it’s a D to D converter as well. In short, it’s a Unison USB digital hub that also does SPDIF conversion and is also a CD transport.
• Compact. Why does size matter? Because most CD transports are huge unwieldy things, despite being filled with little but air since the late 1980s. Urd is 2” high, 16” wide, and 8” deep—the same size as Freya. It’s shockingly sleek.
• Inexpensive. Doesn’t seem so in the context of cheaper transports? Remember, those are just transports. When you’re talking about this kind of device—with a real metal CD mechanism from StreamUnlimited, used in megadollar products, 4 32-bit microprocessors, 100% custom tiny chassis, solid warranty from a company that’s been around for a while and built millions of products, and made in the USA—Urd is insanely cheap.

So how do you use Urd?

Heck, you could use it just as a transport. Or you can use it as just a USB-SPDIF converter. I mean, we’ve had a ton of people excited about simply using it for USB switching, to the point of asking if they could get one without the CD mechanism.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with any of those single uses, but let me talk about my conversion.

So I bring Urd home, grumbling about having to do a big complex manual. I plug it in, turn it on, and plug it into my Jotunheim 2’s ES9028 card via USB. And right there I stop, because it just dawned on me: I’m plugging a CD player into a USB-only DAC. This is weird.

I grab a few CDs and try them out. Sounds good! But even more surprising is the fact it just works. I figured there might be something weird about a CD transport outputting USB, but it’s totally normal. Like it was always meant to be.

But, as I’m listening, I’m thinking, “Hmm, these CDs seem to be a bit brighter than I remember them.” Not necessarily bright in a bad way, not etchy nasty chrome-stripping bright, but brighter. Now, these are ancient CDs from the dawn of CD time—I was too lazy to go downstairs to the big racks that have a much larger selection—and I wondered about de-emphasis, etc…but none of them were marked as de-emphasis. Let’s face it, the 80s loved their supadry recordings, so maybe that was it…

…and then I realized I could plug the computer into the Urd and compare from Qobuz.

Well, that was nuts.

That would surely cause some kind of problem. I mean, this wasn’t a super-specialized streamer, this was my Windows 11 work computer. But I had an extra C-C cable, so I plugged it in.

Qobuz immediately recognized it as “Schiit Urd USB Input 1” and played fine!

!!!!!!

And then I realized…holy schiit this sounds way different.

Oh no way this can be happening, I thought. CDs can't sound that different, can they?

Oh wait. Aha. "Remastered in 2009," sez the Qobuz album.

That makes sense. Comparing the remasters was interesting, though. I really didn’t like what they did.

So I tried a few others. Sometimes it was hard to find something that wasn’t remastered. And some were clearly remastered even if not labeled. And this wasn’t a woo-woo audiophile “sources sound different” thing, this is a “holy crap this has been significantly and audibly remastered and isn’t labeled.”

Aside: which makes you really wonder about a future with no physical media, hey? ​

I found some that sounded close enough so as not to be remastered, but even then, the CD appeared to have a slight edge. Fooling myself? Maybe. I mean, bits is bits.

But I have a doubt…

So eventually I’m sure we’ll do a blind listening on this. Which may prove nothing more than the files are different on streaming.

Aside: again, eek, I don’t know if I like this.​

But to get back to my conversion: after listening all evening, going back and forth between computer and CD, then streamer and CD, then Mac and CD (just to make sure everything works), I’m sold. I can stream when I’m lazy, or revisit 30-year-old albums if I want. And I can compare seamlessly all the streaming options.

So yeah. Sorry I was diffident at first. This thing is coooooooooool.

But ah, the road to get here.


Infinite Miles to Shinyland

The initial concept for Urd happened a loooong time ago, in the before-fore times. I’m talking, before COVID. Here’s how it started: Mike wanted to do a CD transport.

Well, but not exactly a CD transport. It would output digits via USB. Unison USB, to be precise. That was part and parcel of Urd from the beginning. CD in, Unison USB out. And that was weird enough.

“A CD transport with USB out?” I asked, skeptically.

“Yeah!” Mike said. “Because Unison USB is the best!”

“You just got it working,” I reminded him.

Mike nodded, not caring a bit. “Now it’s time for the host,” he proclaimed.

“The host?”

“The Unison USB host. So we can output, as well as input.”

I shook my head. Yeah, cool, whatever. Whatever made Mike happy.

And this started a whole years-long exploration into design cul-de-sacs that included the whole “Schiit Pi” thing—hint to readers, this is totally dead, nevergonnahappen.com, sorry, nopeasaurusrex—and my own follies like, “hey, it would be cool to have an e-paper screen,”—hint to readers: no, this is slow as balls and not a great idea for CD players—and about 50 different computer drives, including CD, CD-R, DVD, DVD-R, trays and slots and all kinds of stupid—hint to readers: all of these drives suck, and suck big time, and even if they cost $5, that’s because you’re gonna need 4 of them for every one you ship to get through a real-world warranty period.

Wait. Stop a moment. Drives are no joke. Drives fall into two categories:

• Crappy non-CD-player drives. As in, everything made to be put into a computer, stuff that was closed out in 2014 at Fry’s for $18.99.
• Actual CD player drives. As in, almost unobtanium these days.

Now, there’s a serious actual CD player drive out there, and that’s the StreamUnlimited metal drive, which is featured in other CD players up to car-like prices.

And that’s the same one that’s in the Urd. For $1300.

Now, we didn’t find StreamUnlimited overnight, so there was plenty of fighting with the garbage drives mentioned in (1). And they all sucked. They were cheap, but they sucked. And that almost killed the project.

But then we found StreamUnlimited, and things started coming together.

But that wasn’t the end of the issues. Oh no. Because by this time, we were in the Rise of the Streamer Era, where everyone and their brother and their dog was talking about streamers, and every audio company was making a streamer, or planning to make a streamer, and other audio companies were asking us to do streamers (no kidding, that happened multiple times), and Mike and Dave were even playing around with Linux-based things that could be streamers…

…while I kinda watched, bemused, because a streamer is just a single-purpose computer. I always have computers around, so I don’t need a streamer. Yeah, I know, streamers can be controlled by an app, but yeah, in the end, just a computer. Maybe I’m weird that I don’t care about this, but the fact is, Mike and Dave fell out of love with Linux-based things that could be streamers due to their downsides—as in, buggy software, expensive hardware (relative to the same computing power in an, ah, computer), the need to have a phone or tablet around to run them, the need to deal with another wireless standard (or, at the least, another network standard, and then listen to everyone complain they didn’t want to run network cable in their house), the ongoing need to support the apps to run the streamer, the customer support inherent in complex systems—but, at the same time, they realized that people might want streamers, and they might still want to connect a computer or phone, and hell, if you were gonna stick a USB-out transport in there, that messed everything up, in a world where most DACs had one USB input only.

Which is the long-winded, run-on-sentence way of saying: that’s when Mike and Dave realized that a USB input on the Urd would be a good idea—and that two USB inputs would be even better.

And that’s how Urd became a Unison USB hub, in addition to a CD transport: because it solved the problem of how you connect your computer or streamer to your USB DAC, if you already have Urd connected. It also addresses the reality of today’s multiple USB sources.

Heck, as I mentioned before, a bunch of people have already asked if we are gonna do “an Urd without a transport.”

​

Aside: and no, I’m not sure what, if any, product variants are gonna happen. USB hub only, SPDIF out only, plain old CD player…nothing is planned. Let’s see how this does before we go farther, OK? ​

And now there was the question of SPDIF.

“No optical,” Mike said, from the start. “Optical sounds like ass. I don’t want any ass-y outputs from the Urd.”

“But...” I started, then trailed off.

“Wait, no argument?” Mike asked. “I thought you’d want to make sure we’re compatible with everything.”

“It will have coax and AES, right?” I asked.

Mike nodded. “Yes, and AES done right and isolated, of course.”

“Then that’s fine. I can’t think of any serious DAC that wouldn’t have USB and coax, and most will have AES. So we’re covered. Leave optical for the TVs.”

And that’s how Urd got no optical.

Now, with the overall template decided, I figured we were pretty well on our way to getting a working Urd. (Oh my I was dumb.) So I started on the mechanical design.

And, yeah, wow. The mechanical complexity of Urd is pretty insane. The size we chose—same as Freya—seemed logical, since the drive mechanism itself fit fine, height-wise, and we planned a fairly simple display, and minimalistic controls.

But oh my gawd the details. Let’s go through them:

• The drive fit fine, yeah, but it was deep enough that it pretty much eliminated the possibility of putting anything behind it. We had the choice of making the chassis deeper so as to have more room for connectors (like power, etc), or keeping the same size as our other 16 x 8” products. But changing the size of the chassis would mean entirely new packaging. So we kept the chassis size and took the hit on space.
• The drive also needed to have a specific alignment with the front panel that didn’t match any of our standard standoffs. Nor did it fit metric standoffs. Nor did we feel like doing custom standoffs. It also had a board underneath it that made formed standoffs painful. So we ended up making a couple of custom stamped brackets. This worked fine, but it was the first time we tried this trick.
• The drive also needed a drawer cover. In the old days, at Theta, Mike used 3M VHB to stick a flat piece of aluminum onto the drawer. This time, I wanted something a bit more, ah, first world. I drew up a custom-machined hunk of aluminum with such strange profiles that I doubted it was do-able at all. Fortunately, we found a company that did perfect first articles first shot—and delivered production quantities without a hitch.
• We needed a way to mount the front panel board—the one that ran the display and oversaw the rest of the functionality—and ended up coming up with a whole new chassis design to do it. To get the precision alignment and seamless look we needed, we added a front subchassis, attached to the top with blind PEM studs, with cutouts for the display and drawer, and mounting points for the vertical front panel board. For interconnection to the main board, we used a vertical-to-horizontal board connector—no ribbon cables here.
• We decided this would be our first USB-C product, so we set it up for that—a whole new connector and mechanical design. For those of you laughing and saying, “Well heck you use USB-C on Modi now,” yeah, that’s how long ago we started it.
• Pressed for space, we had to use a different AC inlet than the ones we’ve used before. Not a big deal, but I’m strongly in favor of common parts.
• For display, we ended up with a simple white OLED, but even it introduced complexities—the rear machining for the window, the correct degree of smoke (ND filter) on the window, the mechanical bond, the offset of the OLED from the board—sounds simple, but these are all details that have to be managed to make a high-quality product. And this is wayyyy more complicated than dropping a single board in a 2-piece chassis.

The result? Urd is the most mechanically complex product we’ve ever made.

But it’s also the most electronically complex product we’ve made. Outputting USB from CD sounds simple, as does switching a couple of USB inputs, as does converting USB to SPDIF. But put all together, it’s anything but.

Early concepts centered around Mike’s general-purpose ARM-based processor idea, managing multiple USB I/O. In reality, that’s complex and difficult to manage, venturing over the “firmware” line into hey-this-is-really-software.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with that, but in the interest of our own sanity, we’ve always tried to stay on the firmware side. The closest we’ve gotten to general-purpose software is Bifrost’s Autonomy Architecture, upgradable via SDCard. Which has worked very well, but it’s also very limited. You’re not going to be playing Call of Duty on a Bifrost.

So, in the end, we decided on a modular approach with oversight.

As in, each USB I/O has its own dedicated 32-bit microprocessor. Two are standard Unison USB inputs, and one is the Unison USB output, or “host.” Another 32-bit microprocessor oversees all of the interaction between inputs, the drive, and the format conversions. So there’s 4 32-bit microprocessors in Urd. Add to that a linear power supply with separate dedicated transformers for drive and digital processing, plus the display, and you’re talking about a fairly complex device. No, it’s not an iPhone, but your iPhone doesn’t play CDs, either.

Aside: in case anyone is keeping score, I think this makes us the only audio manufacturer with our own USB I/O and management solution, developed in-house from scratch, not based on embedded Linux or Android, or licensed by someone who deals exclusively with the USB paranoia world. Not that such a score matters, as that score and $4 will get you a Starbucks, but that score and $0 will get you nada.​

So yeah, complicated mechanically and electronically. But not complex to use. From the beginning, we wanted a fairly minimalist look and feature set. So, Urd has just 6 buttons:

• Stop/Eject. Press once to stop playing a CD. Press and hold to eject the CD. Simple stuff.
• Play. Press once to play the CD. Press another time to pause.
• Skip/FF. Press to skip to the next track. Press and hold to fast forward.
• Back/FR. Press to skip to the previous track. Press and hold to fast reverse.
• Source. Now we get to something you don’t see on other CD players. Press to select the source: CD, USB1, or USB2.
• Output. And another button you don’t see on any other CD device. Press to select the output: USB or SPDIF.

Now, we can discuss how Urd should have 35 buttons and numeric track access and a more verbose screen and all of that, and that is fine, but this is not 1988, and we decided to do something simple and minimal and easy and with only the info you really need. We had enough complexity inside the product, after all.

“So all this complexity is why Urd took so long, then?” you ask.

Ho ho. Oh no. No no no. Not at all.

Let’s talk about that a bit.


Bugs, Supply Chains, and Oversights

Complexity wasn’t the biggest hurdle in getting Urd to market. I mean, we’ve done some fairly insane stuff, some with lots more processing power, like Yggdrasil and Bifrost 2.

But development of the Unison USB output, or, as Mike calls it, the “USB host,” was much more complicated. For a long time, it didn’t work at all. Most of the early development of Urd was simply getting this to work reliably. Even when it was finally up and running, it had many showstopper bugs that meant it wasn’t anywhere near ready to be a product.

However, it wasn’t just the host. The interaction between the two USB inputs, the drive, the SPDIF outputs, and the host all had their bugs. All of these had to be squashed—separately.

The bugs relating to the interaction of the USB I/O were the worst. In fact, they were so bad we ended up making a small run of USB switcher boards to send to alpha testers to help root out the problems, in advance of doing a small run of Urds for a more proper beta.

As soon as we started the real beta, the hilarity started. The first early Urds that went out came back quickly, all with the same complaint: they didn’t work with most DACs. And “most” meant “any other DAC except a Schiit Unison USB DAC.”

Arrrghhhhhhh.

I’d worried about the need to work well with a wide variety of DACs during development, but I always figured that we would be able to test with enough different DACs that we could claim “works with pretty much any UAC2 compliant DAC,” or, at worst, “works with most UAC2 compliant DACs, here’s a list of what we’ve tried.” I didn’t think we’d have to say, “Works only with Unison USB.”

So I asked Dave and Ivana. “Hey guys, what DACs did we test Urd on?”

Ivana blinked and looked confused. “Well, I have a Bifrost.”

“And?”

“And that’s what I used.”

“No other DACs?” I asked.

Ivana looked worried. “I didn’t, I, ah, I didn’t know—”

“Did you test with our non-Unison DACs, like Fulla and Hel?”

Dave and Ivana shook their heads.

Oh no this can’t be happening, I thought, and laughed out loud. “I tell you what. Let’s start there. And I’ll call in some favors and get you a bunch of other DACs.”

So how did Urd do with Fulla and Hel?

It didn’t recognize them, of course.

Of course.

And that started another project to make Urd a truly universal device. Or as universal as we can make it. It works 100% with all UAC2 compliant DACs (that is, all modern USB DACs, unless there are some monumentally weird ones out there.) XMOS stuff of many flavors is fine, C-Media is fine, if you have a UAC2 DAC, you’re now good with Urd.

“What about UAC1?” someone asks.

What about it? Time to get a modern DAC. Sorry to be blunt, but UAC2 is hardly a new standard.

Once the bugs were squashed, it was time to deal with our friend, Mr. Supply Chain. We got to know our friend very well through 2021 and 2022, when he “urged” us to chew through tons of engineering time to ensure we could continue to build the products we make.

And Urd was no exception.

The biggest scare we had on Urd was the drives. It looked like the drives were going to be unobtanium for a while. And if that had continued, that would have been the end of the project. Because after literal years of dev, nobody was excited about the prospect of re-engineering for a different transport. Especially since all the metal would have to be scrapped, and a new drive might have additional ramifications beyond the metal—would it use the same power supply? How about the firmware that communicated with the drive board? And what about the drive itself? Would we now be stuck with a computer-type drive?

​

Aside: in my chapter on “when to say when,” I use “energy” or “enthusiasm” as a metric for what to work on. Losing the drive on Urd wouldn’t technically kill the project, but it would definitely kill any enthusiasm we had for it. If the drive had been lost, Urd would have been lost.​

It didn’t stop there. The custom IEC inlet we spec’d? Oh yeah only 140 of those on the planet. We finally found enough for the run by going to several resellers, some obscure. The Microchip parts we use were on constraint. Heck, the regulators weren’t available in the right package size for a while.

And, when we finally got the drives in, they were wrong. As in, they were the less expensive, plastic-tray versions. We’d been sent the wrong thing. Apologies happened fast and StreamUnlimited turned around the correct drives pronto, but it was just another thing keeping us from production.

Not all bumps in the road were supply chain, though. We made a late change on the USB connector, to incorporate a new high-reliability design, as well as other detail changes we learned from the short run.

Finally, boards got ordered and the kit was sent to the PCB assembler in Utah.

It was the end of a long slog. All I needed to do was to take one home, go through all its functions so I could do a manual…

…and it was only there, at the end of a very long road, did I discover how great Urd truly was.


The Future

So where does this leave us?

With another option for playing CDs—one of many out there—but also a new way of integrating a whole digital system. With more devices showing up with USB output, and with people still having local files on computers, and with people stopping by who might want to connect their gear with different streaming subscriptions and different files, there are maybe more USB devices than you have ports for on your DAC. Which is a little weird. So maybe we should consider doing a Unison USB hub alone (though that’s not done).

And maybe you’re not interested in this new world, and you want to just plumb the depths of the CD racks at the local thrift stores, which are still cheap, even in the era of stupid-priced LPs. So maybe we should consider a CD transport only, or, hell, a CD player. But that’s not done either.

What’s done is Urd, and it’s really cool, and I was surprised about how much I liked it. One has found a permanent place on my desk. Which I wouldn’t have expected.

Now, let’s stack it with Mjolnir 3, and a Freya, and, yeah, Gungnir is gone, but maybe we need to do something there, but, as ever, we’ll see.

In the meantime, there’s Urd.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I do!

 

[WeepingGuitar]

Very curious to hear your thoughts on how it does with Cowboy Junkies’ Trinity Sessions.

As would I. Love that album. I would almost get a Syn just to experience that if nothing else.

 

[Huntersknoll]

Now, let’s stack it with Mjolnir 3, and a Freya, and, yeah, Gungnir is gone, but maybe we need to do something there, but, as ever, we’ll see.

Hey.. don't say that. This is exactly where my mind went a few weeks ago. I want to create the mega-schiit-stack.

 

[adydula]

2023 Chapter 8
Rebooting the CD


I’ll admit it: I was a late convert to the Urd.

How late? As in, after years of development, during which I watched in mild interest as Mike and Dave and Ivana overcame problem after problem, shook my head as Elvis and the production team wrestled with the production challenges, and wondered at the rabid questions from our fans—asking, “when Urd? How’s it going? Got an estimate? Want Urd now!”, I finally took an Urd home so I could write the manual for it, and in an evening, went to a stark raving Urd aficionado.

I’m keeping this one. You ain’t getting it. Pry it from my cold dead hands and all that.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. You might be interested in the entire story of how this extremely improbable product got conceived, developed, debugged, designed and ordered, planned and supply-chained, and, finally, produced.

Because it’s a long road. Partly because we didn’t fully understand the complexity of the product when we started, partly due to some dead ends, partly due to supply chain disruptions, partly due to the difficulty of bringing it all together.

No kidding, Urd is the most complex and ambitious product we’ve made to date.




Looks Simple. Isn’t.

“Complex and ambitious?” you ask. “It’s a CD player.”

Actually no, it’s not that.

You’re doubtful. “What do you mean? You put a CD in, and it plays it.”

Well, ah, no. As in, if you expect it to output an analog signal like a typical CD player, you’re gonna be disappointed. Because Urd is, among other things, a CD transport, which means it only has digital output. You still need to add the DAC of your choice to get analog. And a preamp and amp or integrated amp and speakers to make a whole system.

But maybe it would be best to talk about what Urd is, just a bit. Urd is:

• A CD transport. As in, put in a CD and hit play. It’ll output SPDIF digital audio from its coax and AES jacks. Snore. There are plenty of products that do this. Not exciting.
• A CD transport that outputs via USB. Aha. Now Urd is a one-and-only product. It’s the only standalone non-computer device that you can stick a CD in and then plug a USB output into your USB DAC. Getting more interesting, right?
• A USB switcher. Urd also has two USB inputs, which takes it into total wackyland. Why would a CD transport need USB inputs? Because you can plug in a streamer and a computer, or a phone and a tablet, or any combo of those, and switch those USB sources to the USB output mentioned above.
• A USB-SPDIF converter. As in, those two inputs can also be converted to coax and AES as well. So it’s a D to D converter as well. In short, it’s a Unison USB digital hub that also does SPDIF conversion and is also a CD transport.
• Compact. Why does size matter? Because most CD transports are huge unwieldy things, despite being filled with little but air since the late 1980s. Urd is 2” high, 16” wide, and 8” deep—the same size as Freya. It’s shockingly sleek.
• Inexpensive. Doesn’t seem so in the context of cheaper transports? Remember, those are just transports. When you’re talking about this kind of device—with a real metal CD mechanism from StreamUnlimited, used in megadollar products, 4 32-bit microprocessors, 100% custom tiny chassis, solid warranty from a company that’s been around for a while and built millions of products, and made in the USA—Urd is insanely cheap.

So how do you use Urd?

Heck, you could use it just as a transport. Or you can use it as just a USB-SPDIF converter. I mean, we’ve had a ton of people excited about simply using it for USB switching, to the point of asking if they could get one without the CD mechanism.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with any of those single uses, but let me talk about my conversion.

So I bring Urd home, grumbling about having to do a big complex manual. I plug it in, turn it on, and plug it into my Jotunheim 2’s ES9028 card via USB. And right there I stop, because it just dawned on me: I’m plugging a CD player into a USB-only DAC. This is weird.

I grab a few CDs and try them out. Sounds good! But even more surprising is the fact it just works. I figured there might be something weird about a CD transport outputting USB, but it’s totally normal. Like it was always meant to be.

But, as I’m listening, I’m thinking, “Hmm, these CDs seem to be a bit brighter than I remember them.” Not necessarily bright in a bad way, not etchy nasty chrome-stripping bright, but brighter. Now, these are ancient CDs from the dawn of CD time—I was too lazy to go downstairs to the big racks that have a much larger selection—and I wondered about de-emphasis, etc…but none of them were marked as de-emphasis. Let’s face it, the 80s loved their supadry recordings, so maybe that was it…

…and then I realized I could plug the computer into the Urd and compare from Qobuz.

Well, that was nuts.

That would surely cause some kind of problem. I mean, this wasn’t a super-specialized streamer, this was my Windows 11 work computer. But I had an extra C-C cable, so I plugged it in.

Qobuz immediately recognized it as “Schiit Urd USB Input 1” and played fine!

!!!!!!

And then I realized…holy schiit this sounds way different.

Oh no way this can be happening, I thought. CDs can't sound that different, can they?

Oh wait. Aha. "Remastered in 2009," sez the Qobuz album.

That makes sense. Comparing the remasters was interesting, though. I really didn’t like what they did.

So I tried a few others. Sometimes it was hard to find something that wasn’t remastered. And some were clearly remastered even if not labeled. And this wasn’t a woo-woo audiophile “sources sound different” thing, this is a “holy crap this has been significantly and audibly remastered and isn’t labeled.”

Aside: which makes you really wonder about a future with no physical media, hey? ​

I found some that sounded close enough so as not to be remastered, but even then, the CD appeared to have a slight edge. Fooling myself? Maybe. I mean, bits is bits.

But I have a doubt…

So eventually I’m sure we’ll do a blind listening on this. Which may prove nothing more than the files are different on streaming.

Aside: again, eek, I don’t know if I like this.​

But to get back to my conversion: after listening all evening, going back and forth between computer and CD, then streamer and CD, then Mac and CD (just to make sure everything works), I’m sold. I can stream when I’m lazy, or revisit 30-year-old albums if I want. And I can compare seamlessly all the streaming options.

So yeah. Sorry I was diffident at first. This thing is coooooooooool.

But ah, the road to get here.


Infinite Miles to Shinyland

The initial concept for Urd happened a loooong time ago, in the before-fore times. I’m talking, before COVID. Here’s how it started: Mike wanted to do a CD transport.

Well, but not exactly a CD transport. It would output digits via USB. Unison USB, to be precise. That was part and parcel of Urd from the beginning. CD in, Unison USB out. And that was weird enough.

“A CD transport with USB out?” I asked, skeptically.

“Yeah!” Mike said. “Because Unison USB is the best!”

“You just got it working,” I reminded him.

Mike nodded, not caring a bit. “Now it’s time for the host,” he proclaimed.

“The host?”

“The Unison USB host. So we can output, as well as input.”

I shook my head. Yeah, cool, whatever. Whatever made Mike happy.

And this started a whole years-long exploration into design cul-de-sacs that included the whole “Schiit Pi” thing—hint to readers, this is totally dead, nevergonnahappen.com, sorry, nopeasaurusrex—and my own follies like, “hey, it would be cool to have an e-paper screen,”—hint to readers: no, this is slow as balls and not a great idea for CD players—and about 50 different computer drives, including CD, CD-R, DVD, DVD-R, trays and slots and all kinds of stupid—hint to readers: all of these drives suck, and suck big time, and even if they cost $5, that’s because you’re gonna need 4 of them for every one you ship to get through a real-world warranty period.

Wait. Stop a moment. Drives are no joke. Drives fall into two categories:

• crappy non-CD-player drives. As in, everything made to be put into a computer, stuff that was closed out in 2014 at Fry’s for $18.99.
• Actual CD player drives. As in, almost unobtanium these days.

Now, there’s a serious actual CD player drive out there, and that’s the StreamUnlimited metal drive, which is featured in other CD players up to car-like prices.

And that’s the same one that’s in the Urd. For $1300.

Now, we didn’t find StreamUnlimited overnight, so there was plenty of fighting with the garbage drives mentioned in (1). And they all sucked. They were cheap, but they sucked. And that almost killed the project.

But then we found StreamUnlimited, and things started coming together.

But that wasn’t the end of the issues. Oh no. Because by this time, we were in the Rise of the Streamer Era, where everyone and their brother and their dog was talking about streamers, and every audio company was making a streamer, or planning to make a streamer, and other audio companies were asking us to do streamers (no kidding, that happened multiple times), and Mike and Dave were even playing around with Linux-based things that could be streamers…

…while I kinda watched, bemused, because a streamer is just a single-purpose computer. I always have computers around, so I don’t need a streamer. Yeah, I know, streamers can be controlled by an app, but yeah, in the end, just a computer. Maybe I’m weird that I don’t care about this, but the fact is, Mike and Dave fell out of love with Linux-based things that could be streamers due to their downsides—as in, buggy software, expensive hardware (relative to the same computing power in an, ah, computer), the need to have a phone or tablet around to run them, the need to deal with another wireless standard (or, at the least, another network standard, and then listen to everyone complain they didn’t want to run network cable in their house), the ongoing need to support the apps to run the streamer, the customer support inherent in complex systems—but, at the same time, they realized that people might want streamers, and they might still want to connect a computer or phone, and hell, if you were gonna stick a USB-out transport in there, that messed everything up, in a world where most DACs had one USB input only.

Which is the long-winded, run-on-sentence way of saying: that’s when Mike and Dave realized that a USB input on the Urd would be a good idea—and that two USB inputs would be even better.

And that’s how Urd became a Unison USB hub, in addition to a CD transport: because it solved the problem of how you connect your computer or streamer to your USB DAC, if you already have Urd connected. It also addresses the reality of today’s multiple USB sources.

Heck, as I mentioned before, a bunch of people have already asked if we are gonna do “an Urd without a transport.”

​

Aside: and no, I’m not sure what, if any, product variants are gonna happen. USB hub only, SPDIF out only, plain old CD player…nothing is planned. Let’s see how this does before we go farther, OK? ​

And now there was the question of SPDIF.

“No optical,” Mike said, from the start. “Optical sounds like ass. I don’t want any ass-y outputs from the Urd.”

“But...” I started, then trailed off.

“Wait, no argument?” Mike asked. “I thought you’d want to make sure we’re compatible with everything.”

“It will have coax and AES, right?” I asked.

Mike nodded. “Yes, and AES done right and isolated, of course.”

“Then that’s fine. I can’t think of any serious DAC that wouldn’t have USB and coax, and most will have AES. So we’re covered. Leave optical for the TVs.”

And that’s how Urd got no optical.

Now, with the overall template decided, I figured we were pretty well on our way to getting a working Urd. (Oh my I was dumb.) So I started on the mechanical design.

And, yeah, wow. The mechanical complexity of Urd is pretty insane. The size we chose—same as Freya—seemed logical, since the drive mechanism itself fit fine, height-wise, and we planned a fairly simple display, and minimalistic controls.

But oh my gawd the details. Let’s go through them:

• The drive fit fine, yeah, but it was deep enough that it pretty much eliminated the possibility of putting anything behind it. We had the choice of making the chassis deeper so as to have more room for connectors (like power, etc), or keeping the same size as our other 16 x 8” products. But changing the size of the chassis would mean entirely new packaging. So we kept the chassis size and took the hit on space.
• The drive also needed to have a specific alignment with the front panel that didn’t match any of our standard standoffs. Nor did it fit metric standoffs. Nor did we feel like doing custom standoffs. It also had a board underneath it that made formed standoffs painful. So we ended up making a couple of custom stamped brackets. This worked fine, but it was the first time we tried this trick.
• The drive also needed a drawer cover. In the old days, at Theta, Mike used 3M VHB to stick a flat piece of aluminum onto the drawer. This time, I wanted something a bit more, ah, first world. I drew up a custom-machined hunk of aluminum with such strange profiles that I doubted it was do-able at all. Fortunately, we found a company that did perfect first articles first shot—and delivered production quantities without a hitch.
• We needed a way to mount the front panel board—the one that ran the display and oversaw the rest of the functionality—and ended up coming up with a whole new chassis design to do it. To get the precision alignment and seamless look we needed, we added a front subchassis, attached to the top with blind PEM studs, with cutouts for the display and drawer, and mounting points for the vertical front panel board. For interconnection to the main board, we used a vertical-to-horizontal board connector—no ribbon cables here.
• We decided this would be our first USB-C product, so we set it up for that—a whole new connector and mechanical design. For those of you laughing and saying, “Well heck you use USB-C on Modi now,” yeah, that’s how long ago we started it.
• Pressed for space, we had to use a different AC inlet than the ones we’ve used before. Not a big deal, but I’m strongly in favor of common parts.
• For display, we ended up with a simple white OLED, but even it introduced complexities—the rear machining for the window, the correct degree of smoke (ND filter) on the window, the mechanical bond, the offset of the OLED from the board—sounds simple, but these are all details that have to be managed to make a high-quality product. And this is wayyyy more complicated than dropping a single board in a 2-piece chassis.

The result? Urd is the most mechanically complex product we’ve ever made.

But it’s also the most electronically complex product we’ve made. Outputting USB from CD sounds simple, as does switching a couple of USB inputs, as does converting USB to SPDIF. But put all together, it’s anything but.

Early concepts centered around Mike’s general-purpose ARM-based processor idea, managing multiple USB I/O. In reality, that’s complex and difficult to manage, venturing over the “firmware” line into hey-this-is-really-software.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with that, but in the interest of our own sanity, we’ve always tried to stay on the firmware side. The closest we’ve gotten to general-purpose software is Bifrost’s Autonomy Architecture, upgradable via SDCard. Which has worked very well, but it’s also very limited. You’re not going to be playing Call of Duty on a Bifrost.

So, in the end, we decided on a modular approach with oversight.

As in, each USB I/O has its own dedicated 32-bit microprocessor. Two are standard Unison USB inputs, and one is the Unison USB output, or “host.” Another 32-bit microprocessor oversees all of the interaction between inputs, the drive, and the format conversions. So there’s 4 32-bit microprocessors in Urd. Add to that a linear power supply with separate dedicated transformers for drive and digital processing, plus the display, and you’re talking about a fairly complex device. No, it’s not an iPhone, but your iPhone doesn’t play CDs, either.

Aside: in case anyone is keeping score, I think this makes us the only audio manufacturer with our own USB I/O and management solution, developed in-house from scratch, not based on embedded Linux or Android, or licensed by someone who deals exclusively with the USB paranoia world. Not that such a score matters, as that score and $4 will get you a Starbucks, but that score and $0 will get you nada.​

So yeah, complicated mechanically and electronically. But not complex to use. From the beginning, we wanted a fairly minimalist look and feature set. So, Urd has just 6 buttons:

• Stop/Eject. Press once to stop playing a CD. Press and hold to eject the CD. Simple stuff.
• Play. Press once to play the CD. Press another time to pause.
• Skip/FF. Press to skip to the next track. Press and hold to fast forward.
• Back/FR. Press to skip to the previous track. Press and hold to fast reverse.
• Source. Now we get to something you don’t see on other CD players. Press to select the source: CD, USB1, or USB2.
• Output. And another button you don’t see on any other CD device. Press to select the output: USB or SPDIF.

Now, we can discuss how Urd should have 35 buttons and numeric track access and a more verbose screen and all of that, and that is fine, but this is not 1988, and we decided to do something simple and minimal and easy and with only the info you really need. We had enough complexity inside the product, after all.

“So all this complexity is why Urd took so long, then?” you ask.

Ho ho. Oh no. No no no. Not at all.

Let’s talk about that a bit.


Bugs, Supply Chains, and Oversights

Complexity wasn’t the biggest hurdle in getting Urd to market. I mean, we’ve done some fairly insane stuff, some with lots more processing power, like Yggdrasil and Bifrost 2.

But development of the Unison USB output, or, as Mike calls it, the “USB host,” was much more complicated. For a long time, it didn’t work at all. Most of the early development of Urd was simply getting this to work reliably. Even when it was finally up and running, it had many showstopper bugs that meant it wasn’t anywhere near ready to be a product.

However, it wasn’t just the host. The interaction between the two USB inputs, the drive, the SPDIF outputs, and the host all had their bugs. All of these had to be squashed—separately.

The bugs relating to the interaction of the USB I/O were the worst. In fact, they were so bad we ended up making a small run of USB switcher boards to send to alpha testers to help root out the problems, in advance of doing a small run of Urds for a more proper beta.

As soon as we started the real beta, the hilarity started. The first early Urds that went out came back quickly, all with the same complaint: they didn’t work with most DACs. And “most” meant “any other DAC except a Schiit Unison USB DAC.”

Arrrghhhhhhh.

I’d worried about the need to work well with a wide variety of DACs during development, but I always figured that we would be able to test with enough different DACs that we could claim “works with pretty much any UAC2 compliant DAC,” or, at worst, “works with most UAC2 compliant DACs, here’s a list of what we’ve tried.” I didn’t think we’d have to say, “Works only with Unison USB.”

So I asked Dave and Ivana. “Hey guys, what DACs did we test Urd on?”

Ivana blinked and looked confused. “Well, I have a Bifrost.”

“And?”

“And that’s what I used.”

“No other DACs?” I asked.

Ivana looked worried. “I didn’t, I, ah, I didn’t know—”

“Did you test with our non-Unison DACs, like Fulla and Hel?”

Dave and Ivana shook their heads.

Oh no this can’t be happening, I thought, and laughed out loud. “I tell you what. Let’s start there. And I’ll call in some favors and get you a bunch of other DACs.”

So how did Urd do with Fulla and Hel?

It didn’t recognize them, of course.

Of course.

And that started another project to make Urd a truly universal device. Or as universal as we can make it. It works 100% with all UAC2 compliant DACs (that is, all modern USB DACs, unless there are some monumentally weird ones out there.) XMOS stuff of many flavors is fine, C-Media is fine, if you have a UAC2 DAC, you’re now good with Urd.

“What about UAC1?” someone asks.

What about it? Time to get a modern DAC. Sorry to be blunt, but UAC2 is hardly a new standard.

Once the bugs were squashed, it was time to deal with our friend, Mr. Supply Chain. We got to know our friend very well through 2021 and 2022, when he “urged” us to chew through tons of engineering time to ensure we could continue to build the products we make.

And Urd was no exception.

The biggest scare we had on Urd was the drives. It looked like the drives were going to be unobtanium for a while. And if that had continued, that would have been the end of the project. Because after literal years of dev, nobody was excited about the prospect of re-engineering for a different transport. Especially since all the metal would have to be scrapped, and a new drive might have additional ramifications beyond the metal—would it use the same power supply? How about the firmware that communicated with the drive board? And what about the drive itself? Would we now be stuck with a computer-type drive?

​

Aside: in my chapter on “when to say when,” I use “energy” or “enthusiasm” as a metric for what to work on. Losing the drive on Urd wouldn’t technically kill the project, but it would definitely kill any enthusiasm we had for it. If the drive had been lost, Urd would have been lost.​

It didn’t stop there. The custom IEC inlet we spec’d? Oh yeah only 140 of those on the planet. We finally found enough for the run by going to several resellers, some obscure. The Microchip parts we use were on constraint. Heck, the regulators weren’t available in the right package size for a while.

And, when we finally got the drives in, they were wrong. As in, they were the less expensive, plastic-tray versions. We’d been sent the wrong thing. Apologies happened fast and StreamUnlimited turned around the correct drives pronto, but it was just another thing keeping us from production.

Not all bumps in the road were supply chain, though. We made a late change on the USB connector, to incorporate a new high-reliability design, as well as other detail changes we learned from the short run.

Finally, boards got ordered and the kit was sent to the PCB assembler in Utah.

It was the end of a long slog. All I needed to do was to take one home, go through all its functions so I could do a manual…

…and it was only there, at the end of a very long road, did I discover how great Urd truly was.


The Future

So where does this leave us?

With another option for playing CDs—one of many out there—but also a new way of integrating a whole digital system. With more devices showing up with USB output, and with people still having local files on computers, and with people stopping by who might want to connect their gear with different streaming subscriptions and different files, there are maybe more USB devices than you have ports for on your DAC. Which is a little weird. So maybe we should consider doing a Unison USB hub alone (though that’s not done).

And maybe you’re not interested in this new world, and you want to just plumb the depths of the CD racks at the local thrift stores, which are still cheap, even in the era of stupid-priced LPs. So maybe we should consider a CD transport only, or, hell, a CD player. But that’s not done either.

What’s done is Urd, and it’s really cool, and I was surprised about how much I liked it. One has found a permanent place on my desk. Which I wouldn’t have expected.

Now, let’s stack it with Mjolnir 3, and a Freya, and, yeah, Gungnir is gone, but maybe we need to do something there, but, as ever, we’ll see.

In the meantime, there’s Urd.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I do!

Jason CONGRATS on URD!
Our hats off to Mike, Dave and Ivana!
It will be a real success!
Alex