Happy to see that we have a real yggy impressions thread now! As an initial matter, so that they are not forever lost in the overwhelming noise and chaos of the general rag/yggy thread, I thought I would transplant my initial impression below and then follow them up with an update having had my yggy for ~2 weeks now.
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Initial Impressions (April 30, 2015) -
I worked from home yesterday to be sure I wouldn't miss the FedEx guy and then spent the next 5 or so hours listening to my yggy. Straight out of the box, yggy is a clear level above all my other sources. What I am talking about here are not huge sonic changes that slap you in the face, like some dramatic shift in EQ. That would suggest that something was dramatically wrong with one source or the other, and that isn't the case. Rather, the beauty of the yggy and the immediate perceptible differences, for me, are in the natural timbre, resolution, finesse and overall clarity of the playback of acoustic instruments and voices in good quality recordings with which I am familiar. Modern music sounds great. Don't get me wrong. But for those who are having trouble hearing the differences between good mid or entry level dacs and their new yggy's, I would suggest A'B'ing with some classical, bluegrass or jazz. A couple of examples and comments:
-I have always thought my Keces dac did pretty well with stringed instruments, compared to many alternatives, generally avoiding what I hear in some other sources as obvious digital playback of strings. By this, I mean that a lot of the texture and nuance of each note are missing, particularly apparent in sustained notes, and what you end up hearing is like a computer's flattened approximation of what a violin might sound like - nothing at all like listening to a violin player in a room with good acoustics. Firing up Arthur Grumiaux's recording of Bach's Violin Sonotas and Partidas on the yggy yesterday illustrated a fine and beautiful layer of detail on this recording that I had never heard before. By contrast, I would almost say that my Keces, Arcam, Marantz, Pico, Odac etc. ever so slightly smear the timbre of the violin. Maybe this is what Purrin and others mean when they refer to the outstanding resolution of this and the earlier Theta dacs?
-I really like melodic upbeat bluegrass, and the Alison Krauss and Gillian Welch duet "I'll fly away" on the O Brother soundtrack is a favorite that seems to test the capabilities of dacs and amps I've tried over the years. (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%27ll_Fly_Away#Alison_Krauss_and_Gillian_Welch ) It is fast paced, with complex mandolin and guitar lines underscoring Welch's lead and Krauss' harmony. The yggy embarrassed my other sources in its seemingly effortless clarity and separation of these various voices, instruments and the percussive strumming and picking, which have always sounded just slightly muddled to me in the past, despite how much I enjoy the song. Timbre is also outstanding across the board.
-Ella and Louis MFSL and Billie Holiday's Songs for Distingue Lovers (two LFF recommendations in the 50's jazz thread) were also seemingly better than I had ever heard them. Yggy's presentation has such finesse and clarity, my other sources sound a little heavy-handed by comparison. For whatever reason, I would also say that yggy seemed to mitigate against extreme left right separation in certain jazz recordings which I sometimes find distracting for this reason. Need to listen more on this.
-Yggy certainly does not make badly recorded music into something transcendent, although it may improve on some of it. The strokes and killers, for example, still sound like the strokes and killers, and the double bass in "We get requests" (even the k2hd version) still sometimes sounds a bit "farty" on certain tracks. If 7 days of warm up fixes this sort of thing, I will be pleasantly astounded.
My preliminary verdict is that Yggy is a mighty fine piece of gear,
provided you already have top shelf headphones and an amp that will allow these sorts of subtleties to come through. I think many of my observations above would have potentially passed me by if I had been listening on alpha dogs, hd650's or even hd800's, if they were driven by my hotrodded bottlehead crack instead of my mainline. I'll have to test this theory with my other equipment as time allows, but my current recommendation would be for listeners to tick those boxes first, so that they can really hear what a dac like this has to offer. In any event, looking forward to more listening tonight!
would copy
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2 week update/thoughts (May 13, 2015) -
-Yggy really does seem to mature and improve with time. I do not know whether this is the result of the oscillators and dac chips reaching thermal equilibrium, caps in the psu and analog side breaking in, some combination of these facts and other phenomena I do not understand, or totally unrelated to any of them. Audio memory is admittedly short, and I am indeed skeptical about many things in life, but I believe the reported changes are for real in this regard. My best attempt to describe the differences would be to say that the sound is equally resolved and detailed but somehow simultaneously smoother, fuller and even clearer than when it came out of the box.
-Although this may not be quite so foreign to those of you who have owned other premium dacs, it is the surprising combination of these qualities, and the ultra natural timbre, that makes Yggy sound so good, as I hear it. By way of comparison, I have always perceived certain sabre dacs, including the odac (to provide a well known example) - as accentuating certain sorts of treble and percussive details in a manner that can certainly be captivating, but upon scrutiny, is not highly resolved or entirely natural sounding (sort of reminding me of the ER-6i's presentation of details if you are familiar with those iem's). Further, the timbre and decay tends to sound a little less realistic than I what I have come to expect from mid and high-end wolfson and burr browns dacs, particularly in the highs and lows. I usually prefer the latter for this reason - i.e. if given the choice between accentuated detail or violins and trumpets that sound to me just a little bit more like violins and trumpets, the latter is my priority. (Disclaimer: I have not heard the Vega or other sabre dacs of that caliber, so please do not assume these comparative statements apply to them.) With the Yggy, I do not feel like there are any such tradeoffs. The detail and resolution are there in spades but presented in such an effortless/seamless manner that I am not hearing any details that sound falsely accentuated. In other words, I am enjoying the incredible detail while remaining immersed in the music rather than finding myself distracted by it. All the while, timbre is outstanding and resolved across the frequency range, and fast passages involving lots of voices and instruments remain exceptionally clean and clear.
-Excellent recordings are highly enjoyable on any competent dac and sublime on the Yggy. I just obtained and listened to the MFSL gold disk of Muddy Waters - Folk Singer last night, which I understand is one of a small number of MFSL recordings produced using a multibit ADC that MM designed for mobile fidelity during its heyday. If you already have or ever decide to source a copy of this, prepare to close your eyes and drop your jaw.
-Inverting the polarity on certain tracks makes subtle but clearly audible differences in, among other things, the perceived width and placement of voices and instruments. In other tracks, this effect is minimal. As indicated in the other thread, I struggled to hear this during the first several days I owned the dac. Either it has become easier to hear as the unit has come up to temperature/broken in, or I have gotten better at listening for it. Fun to play with at this point but non-essential.
-I think my Keces 131, paired with the Blue Circle USB to spdif, actually has slightly more deep bass quantity than Yggy, but Yggy's bass quality is phenomenal. Listening to well recorded bass lines is a new experience with this dac. To be clear, no one would ever call Yggy bass-shy. It is on the same order as my wolfson sources in bass quantity, and definitely has more deep bass than an odac, but I think comments about thunderous Moffat bass may be read the wrong way.
-Finally, as alluded to above, Yggy makes for wonderfully immersive listening. So much so, that unlike much of my other gear, I have found it difficult to try and sit down and write about this dac while listening to it. I suspect others may be having the same issue, which is frankly a wonderful problem to have!
