[Armaegis]

So you're telling me I'm not supposed to jab a soldering iron at my stuff?

 
It'll help you reach thermal equilibrium faster. Reduce your warmup time to minutes instead of an hour!

 

[jacal01]

  “You’ll Never Do Any Upgrades Anyway.”

 
Maybe because you tend to respond with "Good luck with that." when we start pining for a product revision. 

 

[JohnnyCanuck]

But then, there was the question of self-upgrades. As I mentioned before, the “No User Serviceable Parts Inside” disclaimer was no joke. We seriously considered not allowing self-upgrades.
 
But that would inconvenience people who really could do it themselves—and it would especially inconvenience international customers, who would have to hope their distributor would be able to do it.
 

 
As both an international customer and a person capable of performing the upgrade myself I want to thank you for choosing the options you did.
 
I upgraded my Bifrost with the uber analog board last year with no problems -- and no hassles shipping it from Canada to the US and back again.  And I agree, it does sound better than the original.

 

[David Aldrich]

May be an upgrade...in some cases...

Solder the RoHS compliance right out of it.

 

[judmarc]

The Bifrost upgrades cured the skepticism Theta upgrades had bred into me.

- Bifrost: Great value for money, happened promptly, DIY so I didn't lose any listening time.

- Theta (Pro Basic): When I purchased, I got the impression programming or chip upgrades would be available. Neither ever was for the Basic AFAIK. I got one upgrade in the 20 years I owned it - the balanced configuration, a major upgrade and great value for money, but still $800. Had to send it away for a month or 6 weeks or something.

So when I bought the Bifrost it was with the idea I'd better be happy if I never saw any upgrades. And I would have been - the original was a really nice piece, nothing like it for the price. Then you made me a believer on the upgrade side, too.

 

[KLJTech]

Solder the RoHS compliance right out of it.

 
But...I have a two spools of Cardas Lead Free Tri Eutectic solder sitting right here. 

 
Are most of you guys that upgraded your own DAC's using an antistatic wrist strap and grounding it before jumping in head first? 

 

[KLJTech]

The Bifrost upgrades cured the skepticism Theta upgrades had bred into me.

- Bifrost: Great value for money, happened promptly, DIY so I didn't lose any listening time.

- Theta (Pro Basic): When I purchased, I got the impression programming or chip upgrades would be available. Neither ever was for the Basic AFAIK. I got one upgrade in the 20 years I owned it - the balanced configuration, a major upgrade and great value for money, but still $800. Had to send it away for a month or 6 weeks or something.

So when I bought the Bifrost it was with the idea I'd better be happy if I never saw any upgrades. And I would have been - the original was a really nice piece, nothing like it for the price. Then you made me a believer out of me on the upgrade side, too.

 
I think a lot of us that have been at this for a long time have heard "upgradeable" many times, but the upgrades never came to pass or the prices were outrageous. It's refreshing the way that Schiit Audio has come through for their customers not only with meaningful upgrades but upgrades that are reasonably priced. Its a damn good way to earn customer loyalty. 

 

[fenderf4i]

Are most of you guys that upgraded your own DAC's using an antistatic wrist strap and grounding it before jumping in head first? 

I always do as a precaution. Why take the risk?

 

[judmarc]

 
Are most of you guys that upgraded your own DAC's using an antistatic wrist strap and grounding it before jumping in head first? 

 
Heck no.  Here I am before the upgrade - didn't even need a soldering iron this way!
 

 

[David Aldrich]

Mike, I see you lurking. Did that story have enough bat testicles? I bet it didn't have enough bat testicles did it?

 

[David Aldrich]

   
But...I have a two spools of Cardas Lead Free Tri Eutectic solder sitting right here. 

 
Are most of you guys that upgraded your own DAC's using an antistatic wrist strap and grounding it before jumping in head first? 

 

   
Heck no.  Here I am before the upgrade - didn't even need a soldering iron this way!
 

 
I work with bare electronic boards almost daily at work, I may take things for granted and may well just be lucky I've never fried anything. That being said, I'm not a Van der Graaf static electricity generator, with a small amount of caution and some common electrical sense it's pretty easy not to foobar things. A lot of PC builders get all up in arms about static dissipation straps and all that. Unless you're doing laps around the carpeted room on the second floor in your socks the occasional grounding to either earth or the metal PC case is more than adequate static dissipation.
 
But you should probably still use your static strap (I hear the ankle is a great place to keep it out of the way) and you shouldn't drink and set up your equipment at the same time.

 

[Jason Stoddard]

   
 
I work with bare electronic boards almost daily at work, I may take things for granted and may well just be lucky I've never fried anything. That being said, I'm not a Van der Graaf static electricity generator, with a small amount of caution and some common electrical sense it's pretty easy not to foobar things. A lot of PC builders get all up in arms about static dissipation straps and all that. Unless you're doing laps around the carpeted room on the second floor in your socks the occasional grounding to either earth or the metal PC case is more than adequate static dissipation.
 
But you should probably still use your static strap (I hear the ankle is a great place to keep it out of the way) and you shouldn't drink and set up your equipment at the same time.

 
Yep. I recently put together a basic MOSFET matcher and was showing a Schiit employee how to use it, saying something like "MOSFETs are kinda fragile, they get too much voltage on the gate and it's stick-a-fork-in-it time," when the device under test went up in smoke. Turns out that I hadn't connected the gate at all, but there was voltage applied from drain to source. The high impedance of the gate picked up enough static from the ambient environment to turn the device on, hard, and fry it.
 
Nice demo, hmm?
 
Really, it's the big MOSFETs you have to worry about the most. Many ICs will have some static protection built in. Discretes...not so much.

 

[David Aldrich]

Well I can't make any comment about wiring things wrong.

 What was that you were saying about professional electronics technicians and board upgrades?
 
Come to think of it, SoCal is pretty humid, if I lived in a drier climate I may blow things left and right. So that's one advantage to the many disadvantages. 
 
I was also meaning to ask you, do you program all the PICs before they get sent out to the board house or does your board house actually program PICs? (This applies to anything that can't be programmed through a JTAG header I suppose.)

 

[Ableza]

We handle PCBs all the time at my company, but mostly they are stuffed boards and we build assemblies; it's rare that we handle raw components.  Last week all ESD workstations normally used for assembly were busy, it was a rush order, and our Production Manager thought, "PCBs are safe to handle, right?" so she had an assembler put five systems together at her desk, on top of an acrylic desk mat, with no thought to ESD at all.  And, since it was a "rush" order they bypassed QC and shipped the parts.  To Taiwan.  Where two failed on initial power up.  Guess who gets to hand carry replacements to Taiwan and explain things to TSMC?  I do like the food there though so it's not all bad...
 
Don't shortchange ESD precautions when handling electronic components. 

 

[Jason Stoddard]

  We handle PCBs all the time at my company, but mostly they are stuffed boards and we build assemblies; it's rare that we handle raw components.  Last week all ESD workstations normally used for assembly were busy, it was a rush order, and our Production Manager thought, "PCBs are safe to handle, right?" so she had an assembler put five systems together at her desk, on top of an acrylic desk mat, with no thought to ESD at all.  And, since it was a "rush" order they bypassed QC and shipped the parts.  To Taiwan.  Where two failed on initial power up.  Guess who gets to hand carry replacements to Taiwan and explain things to TSMC?  I do like the food there though so it's not all bad...
 
Don't shortchange ESD precautions when handling electronic components. 

Acrylic? EEEEK!
 
How about a nice angora sweater to add to the mix?