[adias]

…
Pro tip for the community: This tread is best consumed while in the bathroom.

Sorry I have to disagree. Well-thought out stuff that deserves full attention. Always informative.

 

[turtlerod]

Sorry I have to disagree. Well-thought out stuff that deserves full attention. Always informative.

I agree the schiiter is the best place.

 

[LobalWarming]

Gungnir MB Unison upgrade OR MMB2?

Yes, most definitely!

Would prefer the form factor of the MMB2 these days but $$$...

Me too. But my office and mind are small, so MM2 it is.

Besides, tube rolling can solve most issues of tone, presentation and detail - as can the mind. However tubes are easier to hoard collect and store than minds

 

[RickB]

I've said it elsewhere, but it bears repeating: the Modi Multibit 2 is the opposite of a piece of gear that wows you for the first few weeks but then becomes annoying to listen to. The more I listen to mine, the more I appreciate it. It really is something special and once again confirms that the folks at Schiit don't just sit on their laurels but are always looking to improve on their gear with each iteration.

 

[styler]

@jasonstoddard
being asked to foot the bill for return shipping on Urd with misaligned tray... doesnt sound right to me.

 

[Rensek]

I received my ZMF Auteur Classics (marblewood) today, and the closest system to me after unboxing is an Asgard 2 & Bifrost 2 combo..... hot damn is this a great combo....USB, Qobuz, high gain at the moment....

I'll get to yggy, gumby, mimby, rag2, piety, & incubus later. For now, good lord does this setup hit alot of marks!

The best Schiit is the Schiit you are enjoying right now..

This is my first experience with ZMF, and well, I get the hype... DCA Aeon Noires were/are high on my list to buy & try, and after recent posts by @ArmchairPhilosopher FOMO was circling the boat.... but those can wait....

The seahorse cases are fricking sweet!!

For all the bargain hunters out there, from time to time it pays to email companies whose gear you are interested in and see what they have available as b-stock, c-stock, scratch and dent, refurb etc.

These cans have a slight crack/split in the wood of one cup. Looks to have been stabilized with epoxy before shipping to me.. Zach from ZMF apparently measures the cans before shipping which is very cool...

Bring on MJ3!

 

[tafens]

Wow! Urd is already in B Stock. Why?

Cosmetic blemishes probably

That, and I believe units returned within the trial period also go to B-stock after they’ve been checked over.

 

[Erratic Gravy]

Proposal for an Urd firmware update:

When an MQA header is detected in the data stream, Urd displays the following…



…and stops forwarding any and all data from that input for the next 24 hours.

Harsh !!

 

[JohnnyCanuck]

Harsh !!

But well earned.

JC

 

[wout31]

That, and I believe units returned within the trial period also go to B-stock after they’ve been checked over.

And I'm sure there will a large audience that won't "understand" Urd.
They will try to compare it with a full featured large display CD/SACD/DVD-player or transport and be disappointed by simple looks, missing features, missing logo boxes etc.
The idea and design is not your common audio gear and therefore simply not for everyone and will often be misunderstood.
I fear for"reviews" for this very special and wonderful peace of Schiit gear. Like Sol, this Schiit item should be labeled "for selected audience only".
</rant>

 

[Jason Stoddard]

@jasonstoddard
being asked to foot the bill for return shipping on Urd with misaligned tray... doesnt sound right to me.

It isn't right. Email alex@schiit.com if that's what they're asking.

Straight from our FAQ:

Wait a sec, what if I get something that's bad out of the box? You mean I have to ship it back?
If you have a problem within 15 days of receiving the product, let us know and we'll do everything we can to swap it out for you quickly, at no cost to you. However, please note that for trans-shipped products, this will only cover shipping to the trans-shipper.

 

[Les Strat]

URD IMPRESSION

After listening to Urd today is want to share my impressions with you as I experience them .
Qobuz or CD? No difference that my ears with the Quads can detect (in case it is the same master)
SP/DIF or Unison USB? Unison USB without the slightest doubt. To me an overwhelming difference in natural sound, attack and detail.

Some of the track I listened to that I'm very familiar with over the years.
A case of you - Joni Mitchell / Wayne Shorter (Album: Both sides now)
Come to find - Doug MacLeod (Album: Come to find)
Samba de uma nota so - Stan Getz & Charlie Bird (Album: Jazz samba)
Fever - Elvis Presley (Album: Elvis is back)
In my room - The Beach boys (Album: Surfer girl)
A taste of honey - Lizz Wright (Album: Dreaming wide awake)
And many more

Well let me start with saying that I thought I had no digital glare in the highs with the Yggy A2. As it appears now I was totally wrong!
Now that Urd is in between PC and DAC, the sound is way more natural and at first I thought it was a little dull until I realised what was going on.
The depth and reverb of the studio ambiance is stunning. The timbre in the human voice that is revealed gives me goose bumps.
More separation, more air around the artist and the instruments, more soundstage depth, more stable placement of voice and instruments in the total image.
Am I satisfied? It has been worth every day of waiting, every Euro spend.

It is almost embarrassing to me that it took the Schiit team so much time, trouble, sweat, headaches and I can just order, pay and play. 1, 2, 3.
A big big thank you to the whole Schitt team who made this little marvel of technique possible. I'm very grateful.

My stack is complete!

Thanks for a great ‘review’ @wout31

I have always had great confidence in Mike and Jason, since I first came across Schiit Audio maybe 7 years ago, and started my collection of Schiit gear, with an original Yggy.

I love the openness of the company in sharing the trials and tribulations of product design, development and manufacture.

I have really enjoyed the ride!

I had no hesitation in upgrading my Yggy with USB Gen 5 output, A2 boards and finally Unison USB board.
I did the last one myself.

Mike’s quest to build a CD Transport was always of interest to me, as I knew it would be good.

The Unison USB output option and ability to use Urd as a digital hub, make it a unique product.

Unfortunately, I lacked the patience to wait for the Urd and bought a Jay’s Audio CDT2- Mk3.

The good news is, I love it!

I have bought so much audio gear in the last couple of years that I can’t justify buying another CD transport.

So, I might have missed out, but I am delighted that Mike, Jason and the team at Schiit persevered with Urd and its unique Unison USB output .

I am also genuinely pleased for all the new Urd owners, whose patience has been rewarded!

 

[Derrick Swart]

And I'm sure there will a large audience that won't "understand" Urd.
They will try to compare it with a full featured large display CD/SACD/DVD-player or transport and be disappointed by simple looks, missing features, missing logo boxes etc.
The idea and design is not your common audio gear and therefore simply not for everyone and will often be misunderstood.
I fear for"reviews" for this very special and wonderful peace of Schiit gear. Like Sol, this Schiit item should be labeled "for selected audience only".
</rant>

I see schiit is doing the complete opposite; design hifi equipment to have fun and for people who don't want or can't spend a fortune on listening to tunes (large qty manufacturing runs and no greedy margins), SOL is disco - too many issues and not popular enough I suppose. URD will also be out if it is not sold enough; already stated that future runs will suffer availability gaps, though next run is already approved. In other words to keep selling prices reasonable they cannot take an approach of 'for selected audience only' imho.

 

[adias]

And I'm sure there will a large audience that won't "understand" Urd.
They will try to compare it with a full featured large display CD/SACD/DVD-player or transport and be disappointed by simple looks, missing features, missing logo boxes etc.
The idea and design is not your common audio gear and therefore simply not for everyone and will often be misunderstood.
I fear for"reviews" for this very special and wonderful peace of Schiit gear. Like Sol, this Schiit item should be labeled "for selected audience only".
</rant>

I think that statement applies to most of Schiit products. No-nonsense, great industrial design, form follow function. I love it!

 

[Erratic Gravy]

The term jitter describes the deviation of a signal's true sampling interval from its ideal.

If you digitize an analog signal at a sampling rate of 44.1kHz, you will take 44,100 samples per second of the signal's state at that sample's precise point in time. Which means that you would ideally take one sample every 22.675737 microseconds.

In the real world, the sampling interval will deviate from that ideal. Some of your samples will occur a few tenths of a microsecond before that ideal interval, others a few tenths of a microsecond after.

When these samples get saved to your storage medium, they will be written as a continuous stream of values, but without any information as to their actual timing, and/or deviation thereof. And when that stream of your previously stored samples is played back, it will simply be assumed that they should be played back at a constant rate of 44,100 values per second, equally spaced at the same 22.675737 microseconds that they were recorded at.

To understand what role jitter plays during recording, imagine the following:

Imagine a perfectly smooth sine wave drawn on a sheet of graph paper.
Write down the Y-value of the sine wave at every point where it crosses a vertical line on your graph paper.
Now draw a dot for each of the values you've just written down, precisely on the same vertical line that you took the value from, at the appropriate Y-position an inch or so below your original sign wave.
Once you're done, you should end up with a very close approximation of your original sine wave. You have just recorded and played back a jitter-free signal.

Now repeat the above, but instead of writing down the Y-value of the sine wave at every point where it crosses a vertical line on your graph paper, measure each and every value slightly before or slightly after that vertical line on your graph paper, alternating between "slightly too early" and "slightly too late" at random.
Now draw a dot for each of the values you've just written down, again precisely on the same vertical line that you (sort of) took the value from, at the appropriate Y-position an inch or so below your original sine wave.
Once you're done, you should end up with a still somewhat close approximation of your original sine wave — but instead of a continuously smooth sine wave, you will now have something that looks a bit bumpy. You have just recorded a jittered signal, and played it back jitter-free.

The inverse is true as well. Measure your sine wave precisely on the vertical lines, but draw each value slightly before or after that vertical line at randomly changing deviations, and you will, again, end up with a somewhat bumpy representation of your original signal. You are looking at a jittery playback of your perfectly sampled original signal.

In the real world, both happens. So not only do you not have a perfectly regular sampling interval, you also don't have a perfectly regular playback. The trick is to minimize those deviations from the ideal interval on both ends, but you will never be able to get rid of it entirely.

There's also no way to compensate for this or correct the jitter after the fact, simply because the samples in your recording don't contain any information as to when exactly each sample was taken.
You could, of course, "invent" a new recording format that not only stores the sampled values themselves, but also a precise timestamp for each and every sample to the most precise degree that your hardware allows. But that wouldn't solve your problem either, as that time stamp would be informed by the same clock signal as your analog to digital converter; the timestamp values would very likely be just as inaccurate as your sample timings.You will probably make things even worse, since the timestamp is likely to be even less precise (because it's more involved to determine) than your actual samples were to begin with, adding deviations onto deviations.

The easiest way around this is to just use hardware during recording and playback that has a good enough internal clock to stay as close to the ideal interval as physics allows. Which is also why many of your Schiit DACs do a relay click when the sampling rate changes from one track to the next: They have dedicated clocking circuits for each, 44.1 and 48kHz, and their multiples — and whenever you hear that click, your DAC switches from one of them to another one.

And for what it's worth: Jitter doesn't matter at all during storage or during any asynchronous transmission of a digital audio signal, as the values will be buffered before playback, and the playback is controlled by its own clock. The quality of that clock matters, obviously, and so does the jitter within a synchronous digital audio signal where the signal itself directly informs the clock for playback, as is often the case in S/PDIF, for example.

Thanks for a clear and concise explanation of an oft abused term - its very interesting that my little USB ' jitterbug' ( similar products are available !! ) when plugged into the USB port next to the SPDiF digital out on my CD/DVD transport does quite dramatically reduce the 'noise floor' revealing a great deal of low level information on music playback - but im not convinced this has to do with jitter and alot to do with digital noise in the SPDiF output