Schiit Happened: The Story of the World's Most Improbable Start-Up

[sixergixer]

And you'll still be as wise as if you'd read everything in between

This isn't true! He'd have completely missed the Roadie Wrap for cable management. That schiit was rad!

 

[bcschmerker4]

Forkbeard translates to Gabelbärt auf deutsch.

 

[Ripper2860]

Nice! The hills outside of Santa Fe got some good snow yesterday, not all is lost!

PS- Welcome to Lossless Legs. You can PM me there if you have any questions for navigating the bounty.

Status is validating at Lossless Legs. Looking forward to it and will definitely reach out once I have full access.

 

[claybomb]

@Jason Stoddard
@ArmchairPhilosopher

Is it possible to add a forkbeard feature that allows one to toggle the LEDs on/off?

 

[bcowen]

Been thinking about a New Year's resolution. Not like I'll keep it, but just for fun.

 

[yyzSB]

I am going to be selling a 2-channel stereo amp with the following power profile, 150 | 300 | 600 @ 8 | 4 | 2. It also has a massive amount of current and tremendous bass. I am doing this raise some cash to buy a headphone and a lower cost amp. My speaker is a 6 Ohm nominal impedance and seems to like more power with a max rating of 600 W.

My question to the Schitt experts here is which of the 2 amps would you get, the Tyr or the Wotan. If I got the Tyr, I could sell the easier to sell long speaker cables I have on the current stereo amp for additional funds. I have the same speaker cable but at a much shorter (mono block) length, that is harder to sell but will work perfectly with the Tyr.

Is there much difference sonically between the 2 amps? Is there a power consideration that benefits the Tyr over the Wotan? Monos are usually better than stereo, but these are 2 different amps. Amp fans are a non-issue for me.

Seems the answer to my question is discussed here.
Wotan vs the Rest

Wotan vs The Rest

“Spill it, bro,” someone says. “All I need to know is should I go Wotan or Vidar or Tyr or whatever. Which one sounds the best?”

Weeeeeeeellll, you know we really don’t get into that so much, but here’s what I can say: if you want something that is big and brutal and dynamic and fully the match of pretty much any speaker, you can’t go wrong with Wotan. It has more power than ever a pair of Tyrs. It has fans to get it through crazy loads. It has feedback switching for more compatibility with different systems, and more gain when feedback is off. It even has remote control switching of balanced and XLR inputs via Forkbeard.

But of course there’s Vidar 2F. Which is a heckuva powerful amp at a very low price, and it has the fun Forkbeard stuff now.

And Tyr, if you want the ultimate crazy mono amp with choke-input power supply. At a very good price now, as we work on finalizing the Forkbeard version.

Bottom line, there’s not really a bad choice.

But if you want one amp…one amp that can drive pretty much any pair of speakers you want to throw at it…then there’s one super-safe, super-smart choice: Wotan.

I hope you enjoy!

 

[porchwizard]

Or the one that one is currently drinking from.

I'll restate that in the classic (my) "favorite beer" answer.
My favorite beer glass is the one in my hand!
My actual beer glass rules are glasses that widen as they go up are good. Ones that narrow as they go up are bad. The classic slightly angled straight sided beer glasses are hard to beat. My favorite all-time glass is a simple British pint glass (not Guiness but the simple sort of conical form \_/.

 

[Timster]

Sisterdale is NICE. Great vineyard there (tell Jason, if he doesn’t already know). I’d live there in a nano-heartbeat, but NO cell/internet to speak of… Perhaps that’s why it is still so awesome - that entire area - which, for those not familiar, includes Luckenbach…

Great land; alas pretty much NO telecommunications…

Can solve that with Starlink. Just before Xmas I became the proud owner of a new Starlink setup.

Ditched the ever worsening 4G internet, which has been the better of the only two options we have out where we live (the other being fixed wireless national broadband - which is a non-starter with down to 1-2 mbps in the peak hours). 2 years ago 4G was fine, averaging 80-100mbps, although I did need external high gain antennae. It's now half that at best and frequently <10mbps.

So, Starlink to the rescue. Hitting 300+ mbps most of the time now, with just a small latency increase.
Yes it's more expensive, but I'm getting a much better service now.

 

[BeyerMonster]

So, Starlink to the rescue. Hitting 300+ mbps most of the time now, with just a small latency increase.

Define small latency increase. What's your total network latency now?

 

[Timster]

Define small latency increase. What's your total network latency now?

I was running 18ms at best on the 4G connection via the Ookla tests.
Starlink's giving me 25-35ms most of the time.
I'm not concerned with real-time online gaming, so it's non-issue.
Google Meet/Teams/Zoom - all working great.
4K streaming - working great, which I could not do with the 4G connection.

As always, that's my setup, my location etc. YMMV.

Edit : Freaking amazing actually that I can stream 4K content from some ground based server, who knows where, via all manner of connections to satellite(s) then back to me, effectively in real time.

 

[JamminVMI]

Seems the answer to my question is discussed here.
Wotan vs the Rest

I’m really enjoying Wotan. My Martin Logan Motions are sensitive and 4 ohm, so I’m not really pushing Wotan to do any really heavy lifting. But it sounds amazing, offers single ended and balanced inputs, and has Forkbeard as well.

 

[562955]

My Cambridge MXN10 arrived today and was simple to hook up. My desktop stack is in storage as we are in week 4 of renovations so i am just using RCA out to a earfun UBoom-L portable speaker. Next weekend I'll be able to fully check it out

I installed MinimServer on my Synology NAS and it took maybe an hour to scan 15 TB of music. The scan also identified tagging issues:

Warning: ignoring incorrect value for DATE tag 198 in file Garcia/jg1981/jg81-04-24.018582.jgb.nak.martin.jjoops.sbeok.shnf/jgb1981-04-24-martin-d2t06.flac

so next up is to fix my tags

I found a windows based application for controlling the device - https://punytunes.app/

Kudos to @sixergixer for 'yammering' about this device the past year or so and for answering many questions from me last weekend

And this my friends is why I use physical media whenever possible !! - Life has far too many diversions that take you away from precious listening time !

 

[Currawong]

I was just watching the end-of-year Schiit stream -- someone not long ago posted or said somewhere that Jason doesn't design anything, but just does marketing, which is hilarious in retrospect -- and listening to Jason talk about "everything matters" the thought came to mind that, yes, indeed, everything does matter, but it's up to the product designer to decide how far down the rabbit hole of "everything" they will descend for any given product. Then, aspects of the everything may well be impractical due to parts, cost, or simply time, especially versus amount of improvement. Maybe there are aspects of the everything that will be reasonable to spend time on for flagship products, any result of which may well also improve cheaper products from lessons learned.

 

[quimbo]

And this my friends is why I use physical media whenever possible !! - Life has far too many diversions that take you away from precious listening time !

No diversion at all for me, I once had 12 of these drawers - https://can-am.ca/CD-storage-DVD-storage.htm

Each drawer held 270 CD cases, however many of the cases had 2 and 3 discs in them and the drawers actually warped.. Now the drawers are storage in the garage. I donated over 500 commercial CDs to my local library and gave away over 2500 live shows to various folks around the country.

Since these were live shows that were torrented (downloaded) the diversion for me was that I had to purchase blank CDs, cases, heavy stock paper, burn each CD, type up a document to trim and insert into the case. Now it's unzip, 30 seconds with MP3Tag, 30 seconds to move the show to a folder (folder auto backed up to 2 more storage devices) and I'm good to go. I can listen to my music from anywhere and when i finally pass my offspring merely need to remove a few NASs and not deal with what would now be about 7,000 shows to dispose of

Different strokes for different folks

 

[ArmchairPhilosopher]

@Jason Stoddard
@ArmchairPhilosopher

Is it possible to add a forkbeard feature that allows one to toggle the LEDs on/off?

Not really, at least not for existing devices because of how the LEDs in some of them are hooked up.

My biggest Starjna question is will it have a 300 or 400 (470) ohm resistance setting for Low MC cartridges? These are optimum for my Hana EL.

10, 50, 100, 150, 200, 250, 300, 350, and 47k Ω
50, 100, 150, 200, 250, 300, 350, and 400 pF