[artur9]

If the speakers are 6 Ohm or above, consider a Raspberry pi and a HiFiBerry Amp Hat. I use an old laptop power supply to feed it. It sounds decent. I use it on one of my desks at work. I don't care if it gets stolen (Please don't steal)

Neat, shame it's Class D (IMO, no need to start a discussion). Didn't know about these amp hats.

a PiZero and the MiniAmp might just be what I need. Where's my screwdriver? (would building audio equipment make that a sonic screwdriver?)

 

[mystaiced]

Neat, shame it's Class D (IMO, no need to start a discussion). Didn't know about these amp hats.

a PiZero and the MiniAmp might just be what I need. Where's my screwdriver? (would building audio equipment make that a sonic screwdriver?)

 

[Zer0.p0int.Zer0]

Maybe an unanswerable question but is there a noticeable difference between those two? I searched this thread but didn't find any listening impressions. It's a very long thread and I could have easily missed it, but would be happy to read it if directed to the post(s).

I have not heard either of the multibit DAC cards. I had been toying with the idea of buying one for my Rag 2 and was planning to wait for the release of the new version with Unison USB.

I would be inclined to believe the difference would be similar to upgrading the other Schiit DACs USB input to Unison.

I had Bifrost and Yggdrasil both upgraded from Gen 5 to Unison. To me, it is a subtle improvement, but sounds better overall.

 

[Derrick Swart]

We should be shipping a lot more Urds on Monday. Not all the orders, but hopefully we'll be caught up by the end of next week.

The URD Bakery!

 

[Derrick Swart]

I veeeeeeeeeery much enjoy the direction MisterWives is taking with their newest release. Nosebleeds, the album's title track, absolutely slaps.

great picture

 

[RCBinTN]

I have Roon with a Mac endpoint Connected to Bifrost 2/64. Once in a while, when switching from mac speakers (system output) to the Bifrost, it seems to get "stuck" and I am unable to compete the toggle back to the Dac. I'm forced to reboot the Mac, after which, things are back to normal. Sometimes, I go a month or longer without running into the problem. I'm not sure why this is happening. I'm guessing it's something to do with the Mac OS.

Leo

Are you designating the DAC to be in "exclusive mode" for Roon? Reading on their help thread last night, that seems to be what we need to do ...
I finally realized this when my brain kicked in (took a long time). With System Output, Roon was playing Qobuz, and the Mac was playing YouTube and system sounds, thru my headphones. So that means the Qobuz music is also going thru the Mac's audio processor, before going through USB to the DAC.

 

[ArmchairPhilosopher]

As soon as I got my M1 Studio Max, I re-purposed the M1 Mac Mini to my main headphone rig. I'll likely get another Mini for the big system in the family room (that already has an Apple TV and an Amazon Firestick attached. The Firestick is redundant and I'm just too lazy to get around to unplugging it).

That's essentially what my setups look like, too. I'm using my main work computer (16GB M1 Mac mini) with a Roon client for my headphone listening, simply because that's how I listen to music while I work. And I've got a headless 8GB M1 Mac mini sitting in my two channel system in my living room that's got Roon Server running on it for critical listening (via USB), and I use my appleTV (via the TV's optical out) for casual listening, simply because I despise the Roon remote app on iOS so freaking much that I'd rather use Apple Music on my appleTV via optical and have the TV on the whole time to essentially just heat up the room unnecessarily for a couple of hours a day than pull up that f#cking Roon remote every time I just want some muzak while I cook dinner or whatever.

 

[r2muchstuff]

Schiit N Music
Friday Night (Monday morning follow up)

Listening.

After dinner and it's cleanup I settled for a real listening session.
A couple three/four hours later I managed to tear myself away and hit the bed.

The Beyerdynamic T1, version 2, 600 ohm disappeared. The music enveloped me.
Been a bit since I enjoyed a session this much.

At some point I swapped to the HiFiMan Edition XS.
Nope, not happening an unwanted interruption.

I will say that the Mjolnir 2 with the 5670 (396A) Raytheon JAN JRP - “Windmill Top Getters/Grey Plates” in hi gain driving the T1 was/is a wonderful combination.

The kit:
Cambridge CXC ->
coax ->
Gungnir Multibit ->
balanced cable ->
Mjolnir 2 ->
Balanced cable ->
Beyerdynamic T1

The session was all CD.

Jimi Hendrix, Justin Hayward, Frank Zappa, Traveling Wilburys and others were included.
Standouts were -
Dedicated; Steve Cropper "A Salute to the 5 Royals" - Included on tracks are Steve Winwood, B.B. King, Delbert McClinton, Sharon Jones, Bettye LaVette among others.

The Three Pickers; Earl Scruggs, Doc Watson, Ricky Skaggs

"Forever Autumn" - Justin Hayward from "Spirits... Live" ended it up.

The Raytheon's are staying in place while they gain run time and settle in.
The Edition XS did not sound bad at all, just too different for the moment.
Stand alone sessions with them and others are required.

The Cambridge CXC is wonderful in this kit; however Urd will replace it at some point. GAS for sure.
Thinking about the Mjolnir 3, balanced splitter cables and a taller stack of Schiit

Mjolnir 2 was toasty hot as it was switched off. Hard working it was.

My mood, my ears, my kit and YMMV.


Enjoy the Schiit N Music

 

[Derrick Swart]

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.

Yes connection differences are minimal in my experience - i use toslink because my dac doesn't have usb (though i've a usb to spdif converter - couldn't hear a dif so took it out). The power supply makes more difference I find and probably that is one of the key features of the Urd and I am guessing but that is where unison probably gets his advantage too, next to the simplification of usb signal, if that makes sense to you techies

 

[Charente]

Interesting discussion about streamers and alternatives and I get the points made. I can also understand why Schiit don't make one.
I use Bluesound Node 2i and have done for the last 3 years or so. Is the software perfect ? ... no ... but it works fine. The Eversolo streamer looks better and has got reasonable reviews for its software and functionality ... and is not outlandishly priced. Essentially, that's what Schiit would have to compete with ... and improve upon, assuming they had the skilled and experienced resources to do so. I guess that's the issue.

 

[AstronomerXI]

That's essentially what my setups look like, too. I'm using my main work computer (16GB M1 Mac mini) with a Roon client for my headphone listening, simply because that's how I listen to music while I work. And I've got a headless 8GB M1 Mac mini sitting in my two channel system in my living room that's got Roon Server running on it for critical listening (via USB), and I use my appleTV (via the TV's optical out) for casual listening, simply because I despise the Roon remote app on iOS so freaking much that I'd rather use Apple Music on my appleTV via optical and have the TV on the whole time to essentially just heat up the room unnecessarily for a couple of hours a day than pull up that f#cking Roon remote every time I just want some muzak while I cook dinner or whatever.

I picked up a 15" LCD display that fits nicely on a bookshelf below my M1 Mini/ShiitStack. It's at eye-level when I'm in my comfy reading chair. I have a trackpad and wireless Apple KB to control the feed. The 16Gb Mini is never turned off so it's ready to go when I am. I haven't looked into Roon (yet) because, so far, the Apple Music service works fine, and a lot of my music files on the NAS are .mp3 (shudder), though there is a considerable number of FLAC files in there. I do have Audirvana. I should re-visit it.

 

[Paladin79]

Tonight's Syn-full song recommendation:

Sweet Jane- Full Length Version- The Velvet Underground

A favorite of mine as well.

 

[ArmchairPhilosopher]

Interesting discussion about streamers and alternatives and I get the points made. I can also understand why Schiit don't make one.
I use Bluesound Node 2i and have done for the last 3 years or so. Is the software perfect ? ... no ... but it works fine. The Eversolo streamer looks better and has got reasonable reviews for its software and functionality ... and is not outlandishly priced. Essentially, that's what Schiit would have to compete with ... and improve upon, assuming they had the skilled and experienced resources to do so. I guess that's the issue.

The Eversolo DMP-A6 is a $50 computer running on a somewhat customized fork of Android 11 in a $900 box.

About a year or two from now it'll still work just fine, but it will also have ripped multiple barn door sized holes into your home's firewall because you can bet your butt that it won't receive any regular updates to fix all the security issues that are present in all general purpose operating systems of this complexity and that will inevitably be discovered and actively exploited in the months and years to come.

There will also be new streaming services you want to use, new and "better sounding" AirPlay and BT audio iterations your phone or tablet (and that phone or tablet's manufacturer's marketing department) will want you switch to, and changed APIs your favorite streaming service will require for continued use. Not a problem, of course, as long as there are constant updates being released that you'll have to stay on top of without accidentally bricking your box. If the manufacturer even bothers to provide those updates, that is. Which they usually don't, because all their resources are already focused on the development of that $1,200 box that you will replace this $900 box with in two to three years.

If you think that's overly pessimistic and hyperbole, just think about the fact that the OS this box runs on is already more than two and a half years old by the time this box came to market. And we all know how "dedicated" even the biggest Android phone manufacturers are at keeping up continued support for their own Android forks, so you can imagine what this will look like when dealing with the niche subsidiary of an already relatively small company that's not exactly known for stellar software quality.

I'm not speaking for Schiit, of course, but I would be entirely comfortable to bet my Folkvangr on the fact that it's not a lack of skilled and experienced resources that keeps Schiit from making such a product (reasonably capable Android developers are a dime a dozen, there are plenty of cost-effective off-the-shelf SOCs to build a streamer around, like the A55 this one is based on, and the people at Schiit have decades of experience designing and manufacturing digital circuitry), but the simple fact that such a box is not a product that could, by its very nature, ever live up to the standards of ease of use and longevity that Schiit applies to their own product line.

 

[audio philestine]

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!

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law

 

[Mike-WI]

Was it here that some earplugs were recently recommended? I searched and couldn't find the post.

Along the lines of passive devices specially designed for noise blocking while allowing speech to passthrough for around $30?

I have used these for concerts:

Etymotic Research ER20XS High-Fidelity Earplugs (Concerts, Musicians, Airplanes, Motorcycles, Sensitivity and Universal Hearing Protection)​

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00RM6Q9XW/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title