[Voxata]

A knowledgeable person on another forum says that a lot of material has lag built into it. Make sure your source does not.

Once you find such then most AVRs let you adjust it.

The Bifrost 2 SPDIF optical has a lot of delay. It's unusable for my home theater setup unless I use USB or another converter.

 

[tincanear]

There are significant differences on the lower left compared to my board.

On the OG (AD5781 based) BF2 analog cards, on both the red soldermask "BFM3" boards and the green "BFM4" boards, the lower left area is where the main (really first-stage) power supply regulators are located. While it looks like the green boards are using a similar power supply setup to the new /64 (TI DAC8812) boards, the additional regulation and/or filtering stages located immediately adjacent to each chip / functional block elsewhere on the board should make any performance and sound quality differences between the BFM3 and BFM4 boards negligible.

 

[j0val]

Yes, using 660S.

It's a big upgrade, soundstage is much deeper when using Jot 2 compared to the B1 board. Much more detail in the upper mids and the now noticable transitions in vocal pitches are a great experience. Unfortunately for my 660S it was a bit much and started to fatigue after an hour. YMMV there. Up until that point I thought it was a big upgrade across the table.

When used with speakers it's a massive upgrade over B1. No fatigue, incredible bass and detail across the FR. Really enjoyable and spacious presentation (Freya S 4X mode). Since I use Bifrost 2 primarily with speakers anyways, this is a big upgrade.

I still prefer the Questyle CMA Fifteen to the B2+64/J2 by quite a bit for headphones however the Schiit stack now has a wider and deeper stage.. something I wasn't expecting. On speakers, the B2+64 is even better than the Fifteen. It sounds awesome. If I was using an amp/headphone pairing that's a touch darker (say, HD650) then the B2+64 stack might just take my preference.

My impressions were SE to J2 & BAL to Freya for my 2ch setup.

*edit** I still prefer B2/A1 for headphones with the HD650 using Jotunheim 2. I'd wager B2/64 would be awesome with a tube amp. For me though, The 64 speaker performance is nuts so - it'll keep doing that duty The Jotunheim 2 pairs beautifully with the Bifrost MB 1 btw. As with all things audio pairing is especially important, as is personal preference. You might think the B2/64 is better with headphones, if it doesn't fatigue you at all (I can be sensitive) go get that upgrade.

Great first impressions. I admit that my Genelec desktop speakers sound even more amazing after the upgrade. Detail and imaging have both been noticeably better.

 

[Timster]

Im not sure about this, or maybe my setup.

From time to time I hook up my Yggdrasil to my tv via optica and I can notice some lag on the speaker output.

Im thinking of setting up a home theater that is 2 channel first; home theater second.

I know I may not be usinv my Yggdrasil/Frey/Aegirs as intended.

Maybe instead of TV to Yggdrasil to Freya a better solution would be TV to AV Receiver to Freya. Again im new to this HT

any recommendations are welcomed

There is usually an audio delay setting on modern TVs, where you can adjust the audio delay so it matches the video when you are using external audio devices. My LG has such a setting, and I have seen others too. Check the menus on the TV's sound settings

 

[Timster]

I was just looking at the settings on the Bluesound Node and there is something there about "Audio Clock Trim". It says turn it off for DACs that can't handle it. Anyone know what the hell they are talking about and whether or not this should be ON for a Bifrost? Thanks in advance for your expertise....

I have the BF2 and the Node 2i. That setting is ON for me, and it works fine.

 

[Alcophone]

There is usually an audio delay setting on modern TVs, where you can adjust the audio delay so it matches the video when you are using external audio devices. My LG has such a setting, and I have seen others too. Check the menus on the TV's sound settings

Typically you can only delay the audio (rather than delay the video), so if the audio is already lagging behind, this won't help.
On that note, if anyone has any device where you can delay the video relative to the audio, I'd be curious to hear about it.

 

[gljus]

Typically you can only delay the audio (rather than delay the video), so if the audio is already lagging behind, this won't help.
On that note, if anyone has any device where you can delay the video relative to the audio, I'd be curious to hear about it.

In my experience, it was Mimby and Yggy that were processing sound faster than the TV could process images, so the audio delay was the solution to the sync problem.

 

[Les Strat]

I totally forgot Schiit uses FedEx home delivery for their basic shipping. Of the numerous packages I've had delivered by them (FE HD) over the years (mostly not by choice) only 1 has ever been on time and that was only because it was suppose to arrive on a Saturday, and that's the ONLY day I ever seem to receive anything from them. I've gotten a notice (electronic, not an actual tag on my door, I work from home so I'd know if they actually attempted a delivery) that "customer wasn't home or business was closed" SOOOO many times from them even on packages that don't require a signature. Only for it to magically arrive on Saturday EVERY single time... So frustrating.

Sorry to hear about your experience with FedEx @yonson

It seems that you are not alone, as several people on the forum have reported similar findings.

I must have been very lucky, as every item I have ordered from Schiit in the States has been delivered by FedEx, and all deliveries have been on time.

I also had a CD shelving unit, which I bought in the UK, delivered on time by FedEx yesterday at 8 am.

So far, FedEx have been far better than some of the other couriers in the UK, notably Yodel, who are useless!

 

[Timster]

In my experience, it was Mimby and Yggy that were processing sound faster than the TV could process images, so the audio delay was the solution to the sync problem.

Yup, that's usually the case, the sound needs to be delayed because the video processing takes longer

 

[Alcophone]

The Bifrost 2 SPDIF optical has a lot of delay. It's unusable for my home theater setup unless I use USB or another converter.

Can you quantify that? I used my Yggdrasil OG in my home theater setup for a long time and then the Bifrost 2 and never noticed latency issues (despite perceiving myself as sensitive to that).

I did some tests out of curiosity with the Twitch audio video sync test:


TV: Vizio OLED55-H1 (120 Hz, OLED), either built-in YouTube app (gaming mode off) or YouTube website in Chrome on Windows via HDMI into an avedio HDMI switch (gaming mode on)
Monitor: Dell S2417DG (165 Hz, 1ms latency, TFT), YouTube website in Chrome on Windows
I checked whether playing the source video with VLC instead of the YouTube version in Chrome improves things and it does not.

I recorded this with my Galaxy S10+ in slow motion mode (240 FPS, not the 960 FPS super slow motion which doesn't seem to capture sound). Using a clap board I found out that my phone's camera has a base latency of 25 ms in this mode, so I compensated for that in the below measurements. Using DaVinci Resolve I advanced frame by frame in the recorded video until the Twitch provided wave form appeared on screen (lower left area), noted that timestamp, then advanced frame by frame until the sound level indicator rose above the background noise level (the app conveniently plays a frame's worth of audio when advancing frame by frame). The difference yields a frame count, multiplied by 1/240 provides the latency in seconds before compensation for the camera oddity.
If I do that with the raw 60 FPS video from Twitch, I get one frame of latency, i.e. up to ~16.7ms, probably because the sound becomes audible at some point between those two frames. I did not compensate for that in the below numbers. I also did not check whether the video on YouTube matches the source video from Twitch or has additional latency because YouTube makes it rather difficult to download the 1080p 60 Hz version.

Audio paths and associated latency (negative: audio ahead of video, positive: audio behind video):
PC + TV > HDMI Switch > TOSLINK > TOSLINK switch > Reclocker > Coax > Bifrost 2: -25 ms
PC + TV > HDMI Switch > TV > TOSLINK switch > Reclocker > Coax > Bifrost 2: 20.8-41.7 ms
PC + monitor > DisplayPort > monitor headphone out: 33.3-37.5 ms
PC + monitor > USB > ZEN DAC Signature: 50-66.7 ms
PC + monitor > USB > Yggdrasil OG: 50-58.3 ms
TV with built-in speakers: 75 ms
TV > TOSLINK > Bifrost 2: 70.8ms
TV > TOSLINK switch > Reclocker > Coax > Bifrost 2: 66.7-75 ms
TV > TOSLINK switch > Reclocker > TOSLINK > Bifrost 2: 66.7-75 ms
TV > TOSLINK switch > Reclocker > Coax > Topping E30: 87.5-91.7ms

Obviously there is some variability in those numbers, with the camera frame rate of 240 FPS = ~4.2ms per frame being the smallest contributor. Also one path having a lower latency than another generally could mean the audio arrives faster or the video arrives later. If both are delayed by exactly one hour they would be perfectly in sync despite the setup being completely useless and for gaming you'd want a very low video latency.

I was actually surprised by these results, I suspected that the TOSLINK switch and Reclocker would add latency compared to going straight from the TV into the Bifrost 2, which in turn I expected to have higher latency than using the built-in speakers, instead those are all roughly in the same ballpark with the TV or YouTube app responsible for the most of the latency. I also would have thought that the delta sigma Topping DAC would have less latency than the multibit Bifrost 2 with its fancy filter, instead the E30 seems to have more than 10 ms of additional latency.

Perhaps the most interesting results are the first two where extracting the audio via the HDMI switch's TOSLINK out seems to eliminate more than 45 ms of latency. This switch also happens to retain the source's sample rate while the TV upsamples it to 48 kHz, which is why I have not connected the PC directly to the TV.
With the HDMI switch used as an audio extractor, the audio in the recording was perfectly in sync, so compensating for the 25 ms latency measured with the clap board the audio was leading the video by 25 ms. Only in this situation would delaying the audio help, but of course the TV's lip sync feature is useless in this case since it doesn't provide the audio. Still, routing the audio from the PC through the TV provided one of the best results. For all other scenarios, the usual audio sync option of delaying the audio would only make the problem worse since the audio is already lagging behind the image as it is.

Obviously I would love for all of these results to be significantly closer to 0 ms (especially with the built-in speakers), but even with up to 75 ms of latency I never got the impression that something is wrong despite watching a lot of YouTube videos this way every day. I'm wondering whether the Netflix or Prime Video apps perform just as bad as the YouTube app, but this is harder to test without special test content.

But it seems that Bifrost 2 and Yggdrasil are competitive with some other DACs in terms of latency, and other factors resulted in a difference of 100 ms between the best (-25 ms) and worst (+75 ms) latency I saw with it.

In my experience, it was Mimby and Yggy that were processing sound faster than the TV could process images, so the audio delay was the solution to the sync problem.

That is the nicer problem to have for video playback. Is the audio delay setting in milliseconds by chance or some abstract number? I'm curious by how much you have to delay the audio.

 

[Luckyleo]

My BF 2/64 board was supposed to be delivered tomorrow. Woke up to an email from FedEx stating that the estimated delivery date has changed....... It's now today! I know that there is a lot of FedEx haters here, for good reason. At least this time they have exceeded my expectations (assuming it really does arrive today lol!)

Leo

 

[433521]

This is exactly how I feel too! My dad served in the Pacific during WWII and would never talk about his experiences there, except for one 4th of July when I asked him about how the sounds of the big fireworks exploding compared to what he experienced. He simply said "They don't." I get annoyed by the people at work who, with a few exceptions, are quite a bit younger than myself (I was born on 12/31/64 so right at the very end of this group!). The complete lack of consideration they show just surprises me. One pet peeve is that people use the company-provided silverware for their lunch and just throw the utensils in the sink when there is a dishwasher two feet away. I could never act that way! That is just one example, but the concept is the same - just use a little "common" sense when you're around others. One saying my dad instilled in me was "Leave whatever you're doing better than how you found it." It's too bad so few of the later generations have heard this advice.

The boomer generation is giving the post genx kids a garbage dump that is going to heat up and destroy civilization within a few decades. But yeah, boomers mowed their lawns.

 

[433521]

My BF 2/64 board was supposed to be delivered tomorrow. Woke up to an email from FedEx stating that the estimated delivery date has changed....... It's now today! I know that there is a lot of FedEx haters here, for good reason. At least this time they have exceeded my expectations (assuming it really does arrive today lol!)

Leo

If you get bored I'll lend you my BF2 you can a/b to your heart's content~!

 

[gljus]

Can you quantify that? I used my Yggdrasil OG in my home theater setup for a long time and then the Bifrost 2 and never noticed latency issues (despite perceiving myself as sensitive to that).

I did some tests out of curiosity with the Twitch audio video sync test:


TV: Vizio OLED55-H1 (120 Hz, OLED), either built-in YouTube app (gaming mode off) or YouTube website in Chrome on Windows via HDMI into an avedio HDMI switch (gaming mode on)
Monitor: Dell S2417DG (165 Hz, 1ms latency, TFT), YouTube website in Chrome on Windows
I checked whether playing the source video with VLC instead of the YouTube version in Chrome improves things and it does not.

I recorded this with my Galaxy S10+ in slow motion mode (240 FPS, not the 960 FPS super slow motion which doesn't seem to capture sound). Using a clap board I found out that my phone's camera has a base latency of 25 ms in this mode, so I compensated for that in the below measurements. Using DaVinci Resolve I advanced frame by frame in the recorded video until the Twitch provided wave form appeared on screen (lower left area), noted that timestamp, then advanced frame by frame until the sound level indicator rose above the background noise level (the app conveniently plays a frame's worth of audio when advancing frame by frame). The difference yields a frame count, multiplied by 1/240 provides the latency in seconds before compensation for the camera oddity.
If I do that with the raw 60 FPS video from Twitch, I get one frame of latency, i.e. up to ~16.7ms, probably because the sound becomes audible at some point between those two frames. I did not compensate for that in the below numbers. I also did not check whether the video on YouTube matches the source video from Twitch or has additional latency because YouTube makes it rather difficult to download the 1080p 60 Hz version.

Audio paths and associated latency (negative: audio ahead of video, positive: audio behind video):
PC + TV > HDMI Switch > TOSLINK > TOSLINK switch > Reclocker > Coax > Bifrost 2: -25 ms
PC + TV > HDMI Switch > TV > TOSLINK switch > Reclocker > Coax > Bifrost 2: 20.8-41.7 ms
PC + monitor > DisplayPort > monitor headphone out: 33.3-37.5 ms
PC + monitor > USB > ZEN DAC Signature: 50-66.7 ms
PC + monitor > USB > Yggdrasil OG: 50-58.3 ms
TV with built-in speakers: 75 ms
TV > TOSLINK > Bifrost 2: 70.8ms
TV > TOSLINK switch > Reclocker > Coax > Bifrost 2: 66.7-75 ms
TV > TOSLINK switch > Reclocker > TOSLINK > Bifrost 2: 66.7-75 ms
TV > TOSLINK switch > Reclocker > Coax > Topping E30: 87.5-91.7ms

Obviously there is some variability in those numbers, with the camera frame rate of 240 FPS = ~4.2ms per frame being the smallest contributor. Also one path having a lower latency than another generally could mean the audio arrives faster or the video arrives later. If both are delayed by exactly one hour they would be perfectly in sync despite the setup being completely useless and for gaming you'd want a very low video latency.

I was actually surprised by these results, I suspected that the TOSLINK switch and Reclocker would add latency compared to going straight from the TV into the Bifrost 2, which in turn I expected to have higher latency than using the built-in speakers, instead those are all roughly in the same ballpark with the TV or YouTube app responsible for the most of the latency. I also would have thought that the delta sigma Topping DAC would have less latency than the multibit Bifrost 2 with its fancy filter, instead the E30 seems to have more than 10 ms of additional latency.

Perhaps the most interesting results are the first two where extracting the audio via the HDMI switch's TOSLINK out seems to eliminate more than 45 ms of latency. This switch also happens to retain the source's sample rate while the TV upsamples it to 48 kHz, which is why I have not connected the PC directly to the TV.
With the HDMI switch used as an audio extractor, the audio in the recording was perfectly in sync, so compensating for the 25 ms latency measured with the clap board the audio was leading the video by 25 ms. Only in this situation would delaying the audio help, but of course the TV's lip sync feature is useless in this case since it doesn't provide the audio. Still, routing the audio from the PC through the TV provided one of the best results. For all other scenarios, the usual audio sync option of delaying the audio would only make the problem worse since the audio is already lagging behind the image as it is.

Obviously I would love for all of these results to be significantly closer to 0 ms (especially with the built-in speakers), but even with up to 75 ms of latency I never got the impression that something is wrong despite watching a lot of YouTube videos this way every day. I'm wondering whether the Netflix or Prime Video apps perform just as bad as the YouTube app, but this is harder to test without special test content.

But it seems that Bifrost 2 and Yggdrasil are competitive with some other DACs in terms of latency, and other factors resulted in a difference of 100 ms between the best (-25 ms) and worst (+75 ms) latency I saw with it.


That is the nicer problem to have for video playback. Is the audio delay setting in milliseconds by chance or some abstract number? I'm curious by how much you have to delay the audio.

I didn't do any measurements, just noticed during dialogues that the sound is off. Since TV's setting was "audio delay", positive value in ms, I figured sound was ahead of video. Judging by your measurements, it was probably the other way around.

I don't have the TV anymore but, as far as I can recall, I first went with a 40 ms delay, moved to 70 and settled on 60 ms.


PS. What is the distance between the TV / speakers and your recording location? Sound travels at 330-350 m/s, so during 25 ms it travels 8 m / 25 ft, which might also make an impact on measurements.

 

[433521]

There is usually an audio delay setting on modern TVs, where you can adjust the audio delay so it matches the video when you are using external audio devices. My LG has such a setting, and I have seen others too. Check the menus on the TV's sound settings

I noticed mistakes in sync on youtube videos played on my tv ... sadly, the recordings are so variable I need to go into setting in my LG and change the audio delay. I can improve it pretty good but never perfect.