NOTE: The following pertains to my speaker based system which is this: Macbook Pro serving up TIDAL streams via Amarra via USB into the Yggdrasil followed by Red Wine Signature 70 monoblock battery operated integrateds into VMPS RM-40. All cabling is pedestrian (cheap).
My new Yggdrasil has almost 48 (continuous) hrs on it. My impressions, I now realize, won't be worth much to a lot of folks. For $2300, there may not be all that many buyers who are used to shelling out what I did for the Modi 2 (which the yggy is replacing) who would make a leap of 23X. On the other hand lots of people want to know how the yggy sounds in comparison to other relatively expensive DACs. I can't provide them with any insight there.
So, with that in mind, I can say that out of the box the yggy was NOT worth the 23X leap. It was surely better in a vague sort of way. But it did have a bit of an edgy etchy upper mid range. There wasn't much of the glorious stuff I have been reading about (and hoping for). The other plusses such as soundstage, holographics, bass wonderment etc. were not particularly noticeable or any better than the $100 Modi. At 48 hours I'm still waiting for these. One concrete and indisputable plus was yggy's handling of acoustic piano. Diana Krall's Live in Paris piano was unlike any recorded piano I have ever heard. It was round, full, robust, rich and theoretically piano-like.
On the plus side after 48 hours, I can tell after probably 3 hours of listening that the warm-up burn-in period is making a big difference. The edginess is disappearing. The presence (yes, Living Presence, AKA human palpability) is getting better and better. Also, one of the things you run into all the time is operatic duets (or quartets for that matter). The ability of the reproduction system to allow you to track both parts separately is a good test. The yggy already is showing great promise there. This is a feature that is new ground for me in my hearing. Which means it's a real treat.
I believe it's too early to make any proclamations about one of the other big deal attributes of any piece of audio equipment. That attribute would be tone. Can you tell the difference between one solo violin and another? Do you expect your DAC to allow you to hear and understand the characteristics of Gil Shaham's Stradivarius versus that of Anne Akiko Meyers' Strad? Or is that too much to expect of a DAC? Well, this is the sort of thing involved in assessing tone production of your system. A simpler test would be this: Can you tell when the first and second violin sections put their mutes on in some section of some symphony? My guess would be that most DACs just don't have the accuracy to pull that off. I'll find out about the Yggy on these tests later on.