[adias]

Deleted

 

[adias]

It sounds fantastic! I’m comparing unison out vs AES and leaning towards AES so far but the differences are small.

In a previous post you say that for streaming:

Mac-USB>URD-Unison-In>URD-Unison-Out>DAC-Unison-In

is better than

Mac-USB>DAC-Unison-In

The URD USB link seems superfluous. You hear an improvement over a direct Mac>DAC connection? The Unison filtering that counts is in the DAC…

And then you say that the URD AES conversion may be better. That Is puzzling to me.

 

[W3WEB]

I once heard a quote that I don't know the source of, "Numbers aren't facts." It kind of blew my mind at the time because of how obviously true it is, but also because of how long I'd gone through life as a good little citizen of the western world without ever having really been exposed to the idea so directly.

The IT department where I work lives and dies by what I would call bullschiit metrics. Things like call abandonment rate and percentage of tickets updated within a day. We even see graphs of who performs best on these metrics at our all hands meetings. Some of the people who rate best are the same ones who I've had subjectively terrible experiences dealing with when trying to get help. Go figure!

Almost as bad as being an IT consultant. In a former life, I was and got dinged by being too efficient. Solving problems quickly doesn't increase billable time. Was glad to leave that career, and join as small, entrepreneurial firm --- where leadership sketched out what we needed, and gave us the resources and freedom to do it. 20+ years later, our IT is really small, efficient (anecdotally), and delivers amazing technology. It's also fun. No metrics.

 

[Timster]

Sunrise 'n' Schiit

 

[earnmyturns]

This was observed on a blu-ray player (set to 2 channel PCM) to Bifrost 2/64 over coax S/PDIF vs. computer to Bifrost 2/64 over Unison USB.

Is that WAV vs FLAC, or S/PDIF vs Unison, or Blu-Ray player vs computer? It's much more likely that the differences are from electrical properties of different sources and connections subtly affecting the analog chain than from a well-designed lossless compression algorithm (Well, I guess it could be that the FLAC->uncompressed PCM step in the computer is slightly buggy, not totally impossible if the computer is running Windows ).

 

[Randolf711]

In a previous post you say that for streaming:

Mac-USB>URD-Unison-In>URD-Unison-Out>DAC-Unison-In

is better than

Mac-USB>DAC-Unison-In

The URD USB link seems superfluous. You hear an improvement over a direct Mac>DAC connection? The Unison filtering that counts is in the DAC…

And then you say that the URD AES conversion may be better. That Is puzzling to me.

I was only comparing the out to the Yggy.


In regards to the usb out or AES out, I was comparing CD sound quality and not streaming at that point- sorry for the confusion. I have used the Mac straight to the Yggy and so far the Urd does seem to improve the quality of the sound. But please don’t take it as fact- I’m not running comparisons. I typically don’t really like the sound of streaming and have found that Urd is doing something that improves it.

 

[ArmchairPhilosopher]

Addressed to @ArmchairPhilosopher:

Excellent! Can you please expand on the virtues of URD-Unison-in to Unison-out onto a Unison-in DAC? It seems redundant.

I think it mainly makes a difference if you either use a sub-par DAC or have a sub-par source. Like, if you have a cheap streamer, crappy phone/tablet, or 20 years old PC as your source, or send your signal through a USB hub of some sort, and then have it feed that into a component with Unison, you get the benefit that the potentially crappy (as in overly gapped, jittery, electrically inconsistent, etc.) audio data stream gets first buffered and then either relayed to the next USB device (Unison or otherwise) or to the DAC chip in the cleanest way Schiit knows how to do.

I'm not fully convinced that there are any meaningful (aural) benefits to a Unison to Unison connection, though. Other than the peace of mind that each component was engineered with a maximum of stability in mind, I mean.
But because of the buffered nature of USB, USB to Unison or Unison to Unison will always outperform real-time data streams like AES/Toslink/SPDIF — even if those streams were created by a Schiit component fed via Unison.

Two caveats to that:
Other USB hubs, relays, and DACs buffer as well, that's just how USB works. But with those, you can't be sure how well they were implemented. So you could end up with a bit stream that's ultimately worse than what came out of your computer. You could also be sitting on a really well implemented USB device and get a result that's just as good as Unison. Or by the same logic, Schiit's Unison could be crappy, too, and nothing more than a clever marketing ploy to convince you that their own Schiit doesn't stink quite as much.
That, and that the benefit of Unison over AES/Toslink/SPDIF is only ever as big as the difference between the theoretical ideal AES/Toslink/SPDIF signal to what your source actually puts out. The closer your source is capable of staying to the physically possible ideal of clock consistency and signal integrity at all times, the smaller the benefit of using Unison over those becomes.

 

[earnmyturns]

I would love to see some experimentation around that and the hypotheses driving those experiments.

Some thoughts:

1. Inter sample timing differences? (caused possibly by more "effort" to decode FLAC vs WAV?)
2. FLAC clipping and WAV not clipping or vice versa?
3. Differences in hardware decoding effects/floating point math/etc?

1. Irrelevant for USB (async), very unlikely with recent streamers with plenty of processing power (that means a Pi 4 with something like a Pi2AES, not a fancy >$1K device).
2. It's all digital, fixed point, no signal processing of any kind.
3. Ditto, FLAC decompression uses exact integer arithmetic only.

 

[earnmyturns]

I don’t know the answer here, but how much more processing power is required by modern CPUs to decode FLAC vs. what’s required to playback WAV when both files are uncompressed?

Trivial difference for anything you can buy today.

 

[adias]

I was only comparing the out to the Yggy.


In regards to the usb out or AES out, I was comparing CD sound quality and not streaming at that point- sorry for the confusion. I have used the Mac straight to the Yggy and so far the Urd does seem to improve the quality of the sound. But please don’t take it as fact- I’m not running comparisons. I typically don’t really like the sound of streaming and have found that Urd is doing something that improves it.

Thanks for your reply. I have a tough time understanding that for a stream... the URD insertion between the Mac USB source and the Yggy input improves anything.

 

[earnmyturns]

Listening to the 24/192 remaster of Tom Waits' Rain Dogs, I think I may have found the limitations of my gear (Or perhaps my ears?). It doesn't sound any better than 16/44 Redbook. This seems like it was a waste of time, though of course, it will probably make money for the record company and Mr. Waits, so it could be argued it wasn't.

A nontrivial fraction of "high resolution" tracks from streaming or downloading sources are just upsampled Redbook. This can be easily checked with a suitable spectral analysis program, which shows a steep drop-off above 22.05kHz (brick wall filter) rather than the much slower drop-off of truly high-resolution digital masters.

 

[Randolf711]

Thanks for your reply. I have a tough time understanding that for a stream... the URD insertion between the Mac USB source and the Yggy input improves anything.

Your logic makes complete sense to me and I agree with it. I’m likely experiencing a range of phenomena- using well recorded tracks on my shiny new toy.

 

[ArkNerevar]

I know all the talk is about the Urd but I just wanted to share a photo of the cuteness of my temp Schiit setup, normally my Yggy is on 3 decouplers but im now using my Modi 3 while my Yggy is upgraded and I thought "can a Modi go on decouplers?" well yeah sorta, only one true but it looks just so adorable, like a baby Yggdrasil!

 

[earnmyturns]

Urd does seem to improve the quality of the sound

Not too surprising. the Urd provides substantial source isolation through its two Unison circuits, blocking electrical noise from the Mac.

 

[AndreYew]

One of my personal favorites was a company I once contracted with that rated the quality* of the work their internal and external programmers did by the number of lines of code they committed to a project by the end of each day. You can probably imagine what kind of behavior this fostered and the quality of the product they eventually ended up with.
You can't make this crap up…

* yes, quality, not quantity. Not a typo.

This is a great example of you get what you measure for. So be careful what you measure and how you interpret the results of those measurements!