The Yggy is designed to NEVER be replaced again. It can be upgraded by being sent in. HOWEVER, the Gungnir is due for some major improvements. I have no idea what to expect but my money is:
Yggy remained untouched because it got unison USB + Analog 2 boards recently, still in high demand.
Gungnir is due for something. I wouldn’t be surprised if the redesign is going to the “field upgradeable” like design of the Bifrost 2. 100% modius is going to put on a card for the Gungnir
Unison USB is going to become standard if it hasn’t already
This may become the first/only DAC to get volume control IF that happens at all.
Schiit does what it normally does and makes something off the wall (Gungnir multibit + Sigma Delta all in one DAC).
Bifrost 2… MAY get a sigma delta card as well. However this thought is less likely with the Modius.
Oh that’s easy! So Schiit got tired of using the CMedia chips for USB. Mike Moffett was never a fan of sound from them. Just FYI, MOST companies struggle with USB implementations but ignore expecting it go away. So, after having issues, licensing and availability costs going up for their USB implementation as well as two successful engineers running a company for about a decade, at sometimes you have to stop being afraid to make something from scratch and right.
So… why should you care about Unison USB? Couple of very important reasons:
Out of all the delays with the Bifrost 2, the USB implementation was NOT one of the reasons. It’s written on a PIC32 so it’s developed in house and they have control over it.
BECAUSE it’s developed in house, they can do things right. That means full support of UAC2 which linux/windows/mac/android/iOS should all support inherently and the standard supports nice audio from a digital perspective that older standards DON’T support.
Remember the Eytr and all the push to go to have Coaxial come in? Schiit got tired of it and solved that problem. How?
When addressing the problem, they made sure the USB to pulse train conversion was done MORE accurately than chips like c media.
With a little more control, and engineers being wonderful obsessive creatures (keep it up you glorious bastards!) the entire pulse train was electrically isolated from all the noise from the chip using “opto-isolators” making sure all electrical noise was isolated from the chip side from the DAC side.
Because of all this isolation from chip to DAC done properly now… they can make the board into a card which means hey… other products can use it now as an upgrade!
I can’t speak of the c media chip… but the PIC32 is ASE certified so Microchip has to give proper discontinuing notice and continue to produce them for up to 10 years after notice to stop production. c media chips however, are not NOT ASE certified or to any standard.
C media chips I think have a monopoloy over the USB audio market, meaning that even though they have flaws they can still mess with pricing. If I were Schiit, I’d deal that a few times and work to stop that in future designs.
Gungnir also had A2 and Unison USB.
The big current issue with the Gungnir, is you can’t upgrade the firmware without sending it to Schiit, so you can’t self install the Unison upgrade.
Their both about the same age, my guess is they’d probably upgrade their flagship DAC first, but A2 wasn’t universally loved, so it will be interesting what direction they go in.
I haven’t clicked on your reference yet but your summary is really interesting. So if they’ve reduced all the noise connecting the internals of the dac to the usb socket everything depends on the usb cable from source and the rca or clearly output cables to maintain the standard?
Basically the USB chip itself is noise as hell because it creates a pulse train. Pulses are noisey from a power supply perspective. Yes, it’s compounded from any noise coming in from the USB cable (be it from the source being noise or noise picked up running around other electronics).
And because of the ambiguity and wide range what is “good” that’s going to leave open a lot. Then there is good as in “sounding good” and good as in “measures good” (becoming more mutually exclusive over time).
The R2R 11 is a decent thing. Definitely like it more than the SU8 + SH8 combo, more relaxed and “musical”. SMSL feels harsh to me. Maybe more detail, but sounds kinda digital.
Hopefully will have a higher end R2R to compare at some point.
So I did that for a few reasons, I was going through windows driver hell with 10 dacs connected at once to a laptop, I wanted things to be able to play simultaneously with little hassle, and I wanted something still very high quality. So I ended up doing what I did, but I don’t dislike usb, for one or two dacs it’s not really an issue, it’s just that more than that can really cause issues, now my pc only sees one usb device and it’s not a big hassle. I’m not avoiding usb since I have that usb to aes device, but it’s no longer and issue anymore. I could avoid it completely with a network bridge but I didn’t feel the need tbh but I would be open to try it in the future perhaps (was going to buy a dcs network bridge but decided against it)
USB if done correctly can be really great for audio, it just has to be a quality implementation. I would take usb over toslink most of the time if the usb is done well, the main issues for usb for me is just drivers and having too many of them lol. My main preference is aes/ebu or bnc coax, or depending on the dac their own special solution mainly for simplicity sake but also for sound quality as well. Also it depends on your pc as some can be very noisy on usb
I have a fairly large dsd library, and all I do is just D2P through foobar and it still sounds pretty damn good (I like dsd for the better mastering most sacd’s have rather than the actual format itself tbh). Some of the dacs also support DoP so I can still send native dsd64 through aes3 for some of the dacs that support it. There are only 3 out of the 10 dacs that support DoP through aes on my rack right now, being the totaldac, rockna, and bat dacs. Most of my other dacs support DSD but only through USB (and the audio note, berkeley, and crane song don’t support dsd at all)
That alone is why Schiit made the Unison USB. They have enough products that providing a crappy interface on most of the their products that could connect directly to USB, why not make it good?
So assuming that there is a big advantage to having Unison USB would anyone prefer the Schiit Medius over say the Audio GD R2R11?
Are there payoffs here or is it still a straightforward win for the Audio GD.
I remember reading a post or article where they did an audiophile blind test between Modi 3 and Modi Multibit and of the 6 or seven participants only one more chose the multibit over the modi 3. So it was a pretty close race. With the addition of the Unison USB and whatever other feature the Modius has it stands to beat out the mutlibit on sound in general. Is that a fair conclusion?
I mean after owning the modius for some time I think it’s pretty great and I do prefer it to the r2r11 from memory, but that’s not because of the usb, I just don’t like the r2r11 lol. I really am not a fan of audio gd in general from what I have heard, so in this case personally I would prefer the modius but I don’t really think that has to do too much with the usb tbh, as even using spdif I would still prefer the modius lol
You’re right - spell corrector - I meant to say that the rca output cable or xlr balanced output cables will be the weak link, unless quality ones, once the Unison USB is implemented.