[Alcophone]

Yep, looks like the issue is resolved and they are hitting their performance goals with the Yggy 2! Nice to see 20-bit performance. But can't help but feel that this upgrade is more like a recall that you have to pay for, unless this "glitching" is normal for DACs?

This has been covered before. A little over a year ago, fittingly.

@Baldr

Would you mind commenting on the zero crossing glitch and the poor performance of the SE summed outputs on the Yggy and Gumby?

There seems to be a lot of controversy on a computer forum about it.

I suppose this merits an annual comment:

I have commented extensively on that other forum. The summary is that if anyone is concerned about aberrations that are over -110 db below peak output then you have no reason to buy almost any audio product period and are far too OCD for us to even value as a rational client. The client base of thousands and the multitude of reviews (including a recent one from pronouncing us the best value ever in the history of high end audio) alone dismiss the dyspeptic comments that have no basis in the real audio world. If you worry about inaudible minutiae you are far better off buying the gear of others and whimpering to their makers.

Some more here:

I hate to comment on any bad PR but make an exception here. First, I address the widely reported and endlessly condemned zero crossing "glitch" on earlier Yggydrasil DACs. It was (and still is) my opinion that said glitch was well below the threshold of audibility (> minus 116db). The results were dozens and dozens of posts by one bellyacher (on another forum) adjudging I was incompetent as an engineer. I then decided to address the glitch by adjusting the filter software. The result was no change in audibility. This change was implemented before the multibit Gungnirs and Bifrosts were introduced and that glitch is not applicable has never been involved in those products.

And some more here:

Case the second: the glitch fix. Okay. Here’s the thing that started this whole chapter. Mike’s already written about this on his blog, but here’s the summary: a couple of years ago, someone got their nose out of joint about a “glitch” the Yggdrasil exhibited around zero-crossing. We’re talking stuff that’s 120dB down. This is despite AtomicBob measuring the Yggy (showing the glitch) and being unperturbed. But this dood was super-emphatic about being able to “hear the glitch.” He went on and on and on and on about it.

Aside: and this is how internet memes get started—one guy gets a bit, ah, obsessed, and spreads his views far and wide, far and wide, and spends all his time online defending them, because, you know, that’s what matters, not family or fun or friends or actually engaging in a productive debate where you learn something, and then someone who searches for the product gets Google barfing up all his words on the screen, because he wrote far and wide on the subject, he must be an expert. Shoot me now.​

Mike and Dave and I kinda looked at each other and shrugged when we learned about it, because we all knew about “the glitch” and had discussed it during development, eventually deciding just to leave it alone, because it didn’t have any audible consequences.

But this guy kept going. And going. And going and going and going (Note to other sites: this is what moderation is for.)

Finally, Dave says, “Well, we can fix the glitch. It’s just a ROM change.”

Mike, who by now is weary of reading about his “incompetence,” says, “Yeah, **** it, go ahead, let’s compare the two ROMs again and see if there’s any difference.”

So he did. And we compared. There was no sonic difference, just as there hadn’t been any difference during development. No big shock.

“So what do we do now?” Dave asked.

“**** it, put in the glitch fix in all current production.”

“For Yggy?”

“For everything—Yggy, Gumby, Bimby,” Mike said, waving a hand.

“And tell people about it, for an upgrade?” I asked, a little nervously. It was a bit early in the production cycle to change Yggy, and Gumby was really, really new, and Bifrost Multibit had just started shipping.

Mike paused, then grinned. “No. Let someone measure it, like, a year from now, and find out it has no glitch.”

“So never tell them?”

Mike shrugged. “Tell them in a year. Or two.”

I nodded. It really didn’t matter. It didn’t sound any different, so why call attention to it? It would be like admitting the glitch was bad, if we responded to this one crazy guy.

So we applied the deglitchified ROMs and shut up.

That is, until some crazy rumors about upgrades to our multibit DACs started circulating early this month. That’s when Mike had to step in and say, “Yeah, it’s a terrible conspiracy, we made a change 18 months ago that makes your DACs measure better, but not sound any better in any way.”

Now, does that mean that there are no upgrades coming? Of course not. The products are upgradable. And we just announced Gen 5. And, are we working on something new? Of course, and always.

 

[L0rdGwyn]

Awesome, thanks for the info, guess I'm keeping up the annual tradition ha

 

[Jason Stoddard]

Hey all, I’m not an audio metrology expert, but I figured I’d confirm our measurements are very similar to Jude’s APx555 and atomicbob’s dScope results. When using a bandpass linearity project file provided by Audio Precision on our APx555, Yggy balanced looks like this:

“Wait a sec,” gasps someone in the audience. “What do you mean, you’re not an audio metrology expert! How can you even have an opinion in this? Are you incompetent?”

Well, maybe. Hell, there are many days I feel like an idiot. And I even started the Schiit Happened book saying, “Once you read this, you probably won’t buy our products.”

But, as far as what I mean by “not an expert,” here you go:

1. The APx555 is new to me, as in just-a-few-weeks-old new. Naomi and Dave are probably farther up the learning curve on it. The APx555, and a half-dozen Avermetrics AverLabs, are new test equipment we brought in because the Stanfords are not well-suited for 100% in-line testing and hard to get reports out of.
2. There are people with a lot more knowledge than me about audio measurement in general, like the engineers at Audio Precision and atomicbob. He understands far more nuances than I do, and presents at AES chapter meets: http://www.aes-media.org/sections/pnw/pnwrecaps/2018/jj_bsmith_window_jan2018/
3. We try to measure enough, but not too much. It’s easy to obsess over what’s going on at -125dB, when you should be worrying about how products can get wonky, and what you should be measuring rapidly during development and comprehensively on the line. That’s why we have a ton of AverLabs (for quick dev and 100% line measurements) and only one APx555 (replacing the Stanford SR-1s, which are still kicking around, I need to think about something to do with them).

And, I really think I should mention that if you want to get into measurements, you don’t need to start with a $28K APx555. The options for audio measurement have never been better. The $450 QuantAsylum QA401 just added ASIO support. The $3K Avermetrics AverLab is an amazingly capable product that’s great for production testing and automation. Farther up the chain, there’s also the $9K Stanford SR1, the $10K DScope or a $13K APx525 that are more capable (and allow you to test products with very high output, like speaker power amplifiers, without padding). Based on our experience, all the companies that make these products are staffed by engineers who understand audio measurement on a deep level, and are more than willing to share their knowledge on how to get good measurements.

If you want to know more about what we measure and why, I wrote a chapter on it: https://www.head-fi.org/threads/sch...obable-start-up.701900/page-467#post_11763661(I’ll need to re-do it now that we have some new test gear, but the principles are the same.)

And, if you want to know what we think about the subjective vs objective debate, since this always seems to come up when measurements are the topic, I wrote a chapter on that as well: https://www.head-fi.org/threads/sch...obable-start-up.701900/page-690#post_12447731

 

[boomtube]

Can someone please break this Schiit down for me?

 

[hornytoad]

Yep, looks like the issue is resolved and they are hitting their performance goals with the Yggy 2! Nice to see 20-bit performance. But can't help but feel that this upgrade is more like a recall that you have to pay for, unless this "glitching" is normal for DACs?

I could never hear this glitch and even Mike in a thread on Computer Audiophile indicated it was not audible . Could you hear it ?

 

[Makiah S]

Excellent to see so many of you coming forward with some very similar responses!

Though I'm ultimately disappointed at @amirm as many of us are, I called him out on his Bias quite a few times on Reddit, and he of course denied it. An I was reading from his site, but this latest batch of Schiit Measurements are contorted and presented with a clear malice in mind. Which again I and many others previously called him out on both now and in the past

Non the less thank you @atomicbob and @jude

 

[L0rdGwyn]

Excellent to see so many of you coming forward with some very similar responses!

Though I'm ultimately disappointed at @amirm as many of us are, I called him out on his Bias quite a few times on Reddit, and he of course denied it. An I was reading from his site, but this latest batch of Schiit Measurements are contorted and presented with a clear malice in mind. Which again I and many others previously called him out on both now and in the past

Non the less thank you @atomicbob and @jude

Actually, the ASR measurements and Atomic Bob's agree for the Yggy version 1, linearity is the same. It is for the Yggy 2 where the linearity differs. ASR's measurements looks almost like they are two sets of the Yggy version 1 since the linearity is nearly the same, and something is off with the THD+N, maybe it was an issue with that particular unit. @amirm has offered to remeasure if someone would loan him a Yggy 2. ASR's THD+N for the Yggy 1 actually agrees pretty well with Atomic Bob's THD+N measurements for the Yggy 2 for the single-ended outputs.

So, before we start attacking people again, saying Schiit is the evilest organization known to humanity or @amirm is a hack who hates Schiit and HF and the world, can we focus on the measurements? There is a lot of agreement here and some consensus could be achieved if everyone just stopped. with. the. character. attacks. just stop.

Linearity at around -95 dBFS (red line on Atomic Bob's graph):





THD+N vs frequency for single-ended at around -87 dB (purple on ASR graph):

 

[ubs28]

Can someone please break this Schiit down for me?

By quickly scrolling threw this thread, I guess someone says it measures like Schiit and now people say he is Fulla Schiit?

 

[hornytoad]

By quickly scrolling threw this thread, I guess someone says it measures like Schiit and now people say he is Fulla Schiit?

I have no problem with somebody posting measurements and showing comparisons where another dac measures better.

The question is can Amirm hear the audible difference with audiophile gear .

I never saw him make a statement that he hears an audible difference other than the Yggy measures poorly compared to other DACs .

One guy over on Computer Audiophile claimed a Yggy glitch on Yggy1 and claimed he could hear it .I could not along with many others including
Atomicbob.
Then I saw this same guy state how much better the Chord 2Qute was compared to the Yggy 1 . Ah ! I had a Chord 2Qute with the Yggy on the same
stereo setup for a year .
It’s not close. The Yggy1 destroyed this dac and it’s a fine dac .

So much for measurements as I’m sure the 2Qute measured better .

 

[MWSVette]

Actually, the ASR measurements and Atomic Bob's agree for the Yggy version 1, linearity is the same. It is for the Yggy 2 where the linearity differs. ASR's measurements looks almost like they are two sets of the Yggy version 1 since the linearity is nearly the same, and something is off with the THD+N, maybe it was an issue with that particular unit. @amirm has offered to remeasure if someone would loan him a Yggy 2. ASR's THD+N for the Yggy 1 actually agrees pretty well with Atomic Bob's THD+N measurements for the Yggy 2 for the single-ended outputs.

So, before we start attacking people again, saying Schiit is the evilest organization known to humanity or @amirm is a hack who hates Schiit and HF and the world, can we focus on the measurements? There is a lot of agreement here and some consensus could be achieved if everyone just stopped. with. the. character. attacks. just stop.

Linearity at around -95 dBFS (red line on Atomic Bob's graph):





THD+N vs frequency for single-ended at around -87 dB (purple on ASR graph):

The point is that you can not hear any glitch at -95dBFS. Full stop....

Time to move on...

 

[Jones Bob]

Agreed, time to move on.

 

[L0rdGwyn]

The point is that you can not hear any glitch at -95dBFS. Full stop....

Time to move on...

Oh, then no one cares that the bit depth has increased by four orders of magnitude? My bad, I thought that kind of stuff mattered to audiophiles

 

[Br777]

Boy do I miss NwAvGuy. Somebody had to say it.

 

[ZetsuBozu0012]

Oh, then no one cares that the bit depth has increased by four orders of magnitude? My bad, I thought that kind of stuff mattered to audiophiles

There are audiophiles, who by my definition are individuals who invest a fair bit of their (hopefully disposable) income on gear to better enjoy music they love, and then there are people who can't enjoy their gear even under pain of death for want of it not being able to reproduce the sounds of cell mitosis taking place on a vocalist's lips during recording, regardless of how good it is at reproducing what's audible.

This has been stated many times before, but I feel it bears repeating. Play music at a reasonable volume, slightly louder than comfortable if you're feeling dangerous. If you can hear something going on at -95dBFS then I applaud you for having far superior hearing and/or listening skills than seems entirely practical. Really.

Boy do I miss NwAvGuy. Somebody had to say it.

Really? Why?

 

[jude]

Actually, the ASR measurements and Atomic Bob's agree for the Yggy version 1, linearity is the same. It is for the Yggy 2 where the linearity differs. ASR's measurements looks almost like they are two sets of the Yggy version 1 since the linearity is nearly the same, and something is off with the THD+N, maybe it was an issue with that particular unit. @amirm has offered to remeasure if someone would loan him a Yggy 2. ASR's THD+N for the Yggy 1 actually agrees pretty well with Atomic Bob's THD+N measurements for the Yggy 2 for the single-ended outputs.

So, before we start attacking people again, saying Schiit is the evilest organization known to humanity or @amirm is a hack who hates Schiit and HF and the world, can we focus on the measurements? There is a lot of agreement here and some consensus could be achieved if everyone just stopped. with. the. character. attacks. just stop.

Linearity at around -95 dBFS (red line on Atomic Bob's graph):





THD+N vs frequency for single-ended at around -87 dB (purple on ASR graph):

@L0rdGwyn, please read my response to @Mshenay below.

Excellent to see so many of you coming forward with some very similar responses!

Though I'm ultimately disappointed at @amirm as many of us are, I called him out on his Bias quite a few times on Reddit, and he of course denied it. An I was reading from his site, but this latest batch of Schiit Measurements are contorted and presented with a clear malice in mind. Which again I and many others previously called him out on both now and in the past

Non the less thank you @atomicbob and @jude

Thank you, @Mshenay. Speaking of reddit and bias, @amirm posted the following on reddit, in response to a poster named frizo who suggested @amirm was cherry-picking by not showing balanced measurements. Among the things @amirm said in his response:

...And no, using the most frequent connector on a DAC, i.e. unbalanced RCA is not "cherry picking." Using balanced as Jude did, is...

And this gem:

...The second difference is that they only measured the balanced output. This tells me they tested unbalanced and confirmed my (poor) results so they decided to change the topic to balanced output performance...

But did we only measure the balanced outputs? I'm quite certain @amirm knew very well that I showed both unbalanced and balanced measurements for frequency response, THD+N, and linearity -- and that Bob showed far more measurements than that from both outputs (not to mention different inputs).

So why would @amirm suggest otherwise to the reddit folks? I think it's because he assumes most will take him at his word that we only measured balanced outputs (and most there did believe him) and will not bother to verify for themselves. And I believe he also thinks that many there probably don't understand some of this measurement discussion, and so, again, will take him at his word (again, most did).

No, they need to sort out their own differences as Bob Smith (atomicbob's) measurements nearly mirror mine
That is horrific performance for a DAC in this price range whether you can look at my measurement or atomicbob's. His review came out before mine and unfortunately he papered over the poor measurements with flowery words on how well it did.

I don't think it fair to say Bob's measurements "nearly mirror" @amirm's for the Yggdrasil 2. Looking at two of the basic measurements (frequency response and THD+N) which he uses to illustrate what he sees as two major problems with the Yggdrasil 2, his measurements are actually not like Bob's or mine. His THD+N plot shows a >20 dB difference at 20 Hz (which I'll revisit in a minute).

Additionally, @amirm complains of the downward THD+N slope, most of which can obviously be explained by the significantly higher THD+N he's showing in the lower frequencies (versus either measurement from Bob and me). Additionally, it appears to me that he measured THD+N all the way out to 20 kHz and may not have had his analysis bandwidth set wide enough to even include the higher frequency harmonic distortion (the "THD" in THD+N) through that range.

The Yggdrasil 2's noise floor is quite low, so the THD+N measurement will be dominated by THD -- as such, if you don't include the THD going into the higher frequencies (yet you show an X-axis that goes out to 20 kHz), then, yes, it'll downward-slope as you increase frequencies to the point where their harmonics exceed the upper range of the analysis bandwidth. I posted an example of the difference between my THD+N measurement with bandwidth set to 90k (Fig.4, solid line), and then with bandwidth limited to 22.4k (Fig.4, dashed line). You can see that the more bandwidth-limited THD+N reading starts to separate from the other one quite early (<40Hz) as the high-order harmonic frequencies become scarcer as the sweep frequency increases closer to the bandwidth limit.

Look at the THD+N measurements below, make sure to keep in mind that @amirm and I are measuring from 10 Hz to 20 kHz (though, again, I strongly suspect his measurement bandwidth is set far lower than the 90k I had set), and @atomicbob is measuring from 20 Hz to 10 kHz. If you look at the level of THD+N at 20 Hz, @amirm is showing around -61 dB (Fig.1). If you look at @atomicbob's at 20 Hz, he's showing around -82 dB (Fig.2). If you look at mine at 20 Hz, I'm showing around -82 dB at 20 Hz (fig.3). In other words, @amirm is showing >20 dB higher THD+N at 20 Hz than the measurements from both Bob and me. @amirm's THD+N doesn't fall below -80 dB until around 400 Hz, again, accounting for most of the downward slope he's talking about.

Fig.1 @amirm's THD+N measurement, unbalanced output (10 Hz to 20 kHz)

Fig.2 @atomicbob's THD+N measurement, unbalanced output (20 Hz to 20 kHz)

Fig.3 My THD+N measurement, unbalanced output (10 Hz to 20 kHz)

Fig.4 My THD+N measurement, unbalanced output (10 Hz to 20 kHz), with an overlaid plot (dashed lines) showing the same measurement with bandwidth limited to 22.4k (versus 90k with the solid line).


And then there's the frequency response...

Fig.5 @amirm's frequency response measurement, unbalanced output (10 Hz to 20 kHz)

Fig.6 @atomicbob's frequency response measurement, unbalanced output (20 Hz to 20 kHz)

Fig.7 My frequency response measurement, unbalanced output (10 Hz to 20 kHz)

@amirm's unbalanced output frequency response (Fig.5) has an unusual concave sag <300Hz, and a greater overall dip than either mine (Fig.7) or Bob's (Fig.6). Of this, he says:

The top line is the Gen 2 analog board in balanced mode. All is well there. But if you look at the two curves at the bottom, both of which are for unbalanced output, we see problems. The Gen 1 board has a small roll off < 20 Hz which we could ignore. But Gen 2 board starts to drift down at some 300 Hz and by the time you get to 10 Hz, it is down by half a dB.

And then to assert that this is an audible problem, he continues:

Controlled listening tests by Toole/Olive show that low frequency deviations that are this broad have a threshold of hearing of 0.5 dB. So this is right at threshold of hearing...

Neither Bob nor I showed a frequency response that came close to crossing that threshold within the audioband. Bob even magnified the frequency response measurement to make clearer the deviation from flat, and you can see this below (Fig.8).

Fig.8 @atomicbob's frequency response measurement with magnified Y-axis, unbalanced output (20 Hz to 20 kHz)

While my measurement is not magnified (Fig.7), the the deviation on that measurement is +/- 0.139 dB for the left and +/- 0.136 dB for the right from 10 Hz to 20 kHz. Within the audioband (20 Hz to 20 kHz), that deviation is even smaller at +/- 0.058 db and +/-0.056 dB. So, whether restricted to the audioband -- or even going lower than that to 10 Hz -- the deviation is well below the threshold that @amirm cited to suggest an audible problem.

So, do Bob's measurements "nearly mirror" @amirm's? No. Again, this is not at all similar to what either mine or Bob's measurements show. Nevertheless, @amirm invokes Bob's measurements (in my opinion underhandedly) to suggest Bob's concurrence with his measurements (vis-a-vis mine) when it's convenient to his argument. Why on earth would he do this? Again, I think @amirm knows the reddit readers will likely take him at his word (most there did), and will not likely check for themselves.

He then goes on to say that measuring the balanced outputs is not necessary (or even represents cherry-picking -- see his quote above) because he says most people use unbalanced outputs. How does he know this about Yggdrasil users? Also, since he posted a frequency response from the balanced outputs of the Yggdrasil 2, the DAC was at one point hooked up that way on his test bench -- why not show the rest?

...Most people use unbalanced output so them testing balanced output makes little sense.

Really?

Even if it was true that most Yggdrasil 2 owners used unbalanced outputs (and not balanced), it made me think of another analogy: Last week a friend took me to an autocross track in a Roush Mustang to do some laps. This Roush Mustang had several different performance settings selectable via a knob. I don't remember the exact mode names, but there was something that was more compliant, Sport, and Track. If you're curious about how fast that car could lap a given track in its more compliant, more tame mode, that's fine. But is that representative of what the car can really do around the track? If you know there's a performance difference between the settings, simply show both. But to show what it's really capable of, you'd have to at least show Track.

Now, if you choose to only measure this car's track time using the more sedately tuned, more softy-sprung mode because that's all you care about and that's the only mode you'll use, and that information is solely for your personal perusal and consideration, that's fine. However, if you're going to make a post reaching thousands of people, or hundreds of thousands (or even more) to discuss this car's performance level, I think most would agree that at least including the Track-mode lap time would be the fairer approach.

All in all, I'm actually less bothered by @amirm's measurements than some of the other things he says that I feel are quite deceptive. While his measurements might be explained by a bum Yggdrasil 2 unit (of all people, perhaps Murphy's law would just so happen to put a bum one in his hands), I believe many of his quoted statements above can not be described as anything but far less than forthcoming.

So, yes, @Mshenay, I do also have some funny feelings about some of the things I'm seeing here. And as I said before, I'm feeling a sense of déjà vu with this one.