The Mike Moffat (#2 at Schiit) Blog

Discussion in 'Schiit' started by baldr, Dec 15, 2016.

  1. Metro

    Metro Friend

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    And what if including Gen 5 USB into Gadget would bump up the price by $100? That's a 50% increase if it was originally targeted at $199. I think Schiit's initial goal will be to keep the price low and evaluate interest and feedback for this new type of product. Also USB as the only input is very limiting. They might very well include SPDIF input.
     
  2. baldr

    baldr Schiit-sterer

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    So it has been way too long since I have left anything on this thread – fandamily, Christmas, working on year end expenses and tax schiit (bleech), etc. etc.

    So let me definitely say "Happy and rewarding" new year to all, and apologize to most for being late as well as those whose Orthodox liturgy follow the Julian Calendar for being early in my wishes. The reason I am aware of this is one of our own Schiitsters hangs with her family at that time to celebrate the New Year.

    The report on Ivana's importing UAC2 USB into a microprocessor is going far more quickly than anticipated. 44, 48, 88, and 92 sample rates are all working 100%. 176/192 (the 2 in UAC2) is just about there, with occasional (every hour or two) farts, which have gone from bombers to whispers. We also need to figure out where to find a good hook to mute the DACs when the music is interrupted or there is a sr change. It sounds more than adaquate for a low cost option and I am quite pleased. We'll see how the last bits of it go.

    RE the gadget, specifically the C=256 pitch is enclosed a paper. The author, Grover Neville, is a colleague I frequently see at RMAF Shows. He works in the pro-audio field and was the first to take sufficient interest in C=256 to measure notes in C=256 vs A=440 tunings and explain why C=256 sounds better in a formal paper. He has given me permission to publish it. My only problem is that it is too big to be uploaded here (1.25MB). Ah, the best laid plans. Here is a link:

    https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tr2qBrcaSPaTEuUz_imbWLJ-wkECMBEf/view?usp=sharing


    It is great to be posting again and I will be back soon with further gadget plans.
     
    Last edited: Jan 4, 2018
  3. cskippy

    cskippy Creamy warmpoo

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    @baldr can you make it available as a publicly viewed Google Docs file?
     
  4. johnjen

    johnjen Doesn’t want to be here but keeps posting anyways

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    That paper might lead to some insightful moments indeed.

    JJ
     
  5. baldr

    baldr Schiit-sterer

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    The link has been edited into the post #710
     
  6. rlow

    rlow A happy woofer

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    Mike my apologies if you've mentioned this previously, but is this something you plan to incorporate into Modi Multibit? I think you mentioned targeting this at your upgradable DACs per my quote from you above, but also mentioned it would not be a Gen V USB killer, and would be good for the under $200 market. I guess I'm wondering what DACs you're planning to target with this...
     
  7. TwoEars

    TwoEars Friend

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    @baldr

    Any developments in the audio world that interest you in 2018? Products? Companies? People? Trends? Also, best of luck to you and Schiit in the new year of course!
     
  8. Larry Megugorac

    Larry Megugorac Craps on Filipino accents to ease inner poverty

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    So how can only one piece of Audio gear take this phenomenon into account when it's probably paired to other equipment that does not???
     
  9. haywood

    haywood Friend

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    Imagine everyone switched their instruments to use c=256 tuning, the resulting records would still play on your old system. The new device is using skynet technology to change unaltered a=440 music and transmogrify that into a c=256 stream that plays on your existing equipment.
     
  10. dmckean44

    dmckean44 In a Sherwood S6040CP relationship

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    I'm expermented tuning my guitars to it, but C=256 is the same as A=430.56 and my tuner can only do A=430 or A=431. Either seems to sound better than A=440.
     
  11. ThePianoMan

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    @baldr
    Thanks for putting up the paper Mike!

    It was a lot of fun (and number crunching) working on the paper. Big kudos to schiit for enabling musical/acoustical research like this to happen.

    I'm going to write some of my subjective impressions and additional thoughts below, but let me first just say I'm happy to answer any questions people have about the paper, methodolgy, my background and process or related topics to the best of my understanding. Or just intensely niche nerdy topics in general.


    WARNING: WALL O' TEXT INCOMING


    The TL;DR of the paper is this: changing tuning frequencies changes how in tune things are. Different tuning frequencies can be used to accomplish many different goals, in the case of C=256, making all intervals of an equal-tempered scale (piano and most western instruments) more in tune.

    Why? Well, it's a matter of musical preference. Some will consider it heresy (we're obviously going beyond altering the signal to altering musical elements) while some will appreciate it immensely. Sorry if it sounds like I'm equivocating here - this is a rather unusual andnovel application of pitch shifting technology.

    What I will tell you, after spending some hands-on time at RMAF with the gadget, as well as a significant amount of time with my own high-quality pitch shifting algorithms set to various tuning frequencies is this:

    If you listen to music with a heavily chordal basis, there will be less dissonance. For power chord rock, gallant classical and acoustic pop music from the northern hemisphere this may be very pleasant. Certainly chords and intervals sound noticeably purer and more in tune (although I've had a lot of pitch-based ear training so I recognize I'm not necessarily representative of non-musicians) my subjective experience of this is an increased amount of my attention being drawn to chordal harmony. From a musicoloical perspective, this lines up well with the baroque, gallant classical and early-mid romantic tonal theory of chord progressions and harmony being a major focus of the listeners experience. I would say the same for any music that uses progressive or modulating harmony as a primary principle. Rock, sophisticated pop, musical theatre, some folk, etc. There's also a lot less 'beating' in the harmonic series of acoustic instruments due to more pure tunings. Some melodies sounded cleaner and purer because of this. I could discuss the acoustic and musicological implications of this all day, but in the interest of time, suffice to say, less overtone ringing = more noticeable tuning purity for chords (and some melodies)

    Now, do I recommend listening to twelve tone or spectralist jazz music using this? It's entirely up to you, but for some musics that use inharmonic ringing or beating (minimalism for example), rely on the particular inharmomic relationships of A440 tuning (much of serialism and some jazz) or just plain don't use equal temperament or western style scales (indian classical music for example) the musicological conversation becomes nearly pedantic in complexity, not to mention increasingly acoustically complex. I'll let you all try out the gadget and make that call for yourselves.

    And like any (good) research, this gave me some insight, questions and ideas into related psychoacoustic phenoma and potential applications, the relationship between periodoc infrequency and musical texture/timbre, and a host of other fascinating and potentially very cool things which are outside of the scope of the gadget.

    Hope some of that made sense.
     
  12. johnjen

    johnjen Doesn’t want to be here but keeps posting anyways

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    So for those who are running jriver (or are running other pitch shifting s/w), assuming this statement from @ThePianoMan is accurate "(a detuning of C4 by about 37.185 cents from the modern A440hz standard), then using a correction of -0.035041015 to the pitch shift, will get you close to the C4=256 tuning.

    Try it and see what you think.

    This is about double the correction of the 440 to 432 correction factor of -0.018181818 I was using.

    JJ
     
  13. ThePianoMan

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    Yup! It wont be exact so there may be some weird notes and I've no idea how transparent Jrivers pitch shifting program is, but it should at least give a taste. I'll check it out today.

    Its actually pretty difficult to find implementations of pitch or synth sofwares that allow you to dynamically retune to a particular note, instead of cents or detunungs of A4. Resulted in an enormous amount of extra leg work for me during the project.
     
  14. Larry Megugorac

    Larry Megugorac Craps on Filipino accents to ease inner poverty

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    @The PianoMan

    I'm sure many of us here on this thread really appreciate your efforts & input on this matter and look forward to reading more on this fascinating topic!
     
  15. gixxerwimp

    gixxerwimp Professional tricycle rider

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    I'm on the verge of pulling the trigger on Eitr/Modi Multibit and am wondering the same thing. Technically, Modi Multibit is over $200, so if @baldr's statement is taken literally this new USB solution will not impact it. It would just be a bit disappointing to spend $430 if an almost-as-good option for less than $300 came out a few months later (granted, Eitr has the advantage of being usable with any USB DAC should one upgrade in the future).

    There are the two opposing arguments of "there's always something better coming along so buy what you want now" and "good things come to those who wait". Which one wins out in this case? Guess only hindsight will tell, unless someone is willing to drop a few bread crumbs.
     
  16. baldr

    baldr Schiit-sterer

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    Firing customers – it all started back at Theta Digital back in the 1980’s and was an unusual, in fact almost non existent occurrence back then - “The customer is always right”. Theta had a receptionist/customer service lady back then who was genuinely nice. (In that era, all biz was transacted by phone.) There was no way to conceal yourself completely from those you interacted with such as email or anonymous fora as we have today.

    From time to time Azita (that was her name) would be reduced to tears when dealing with one dealer in particular, and occasional end users. I felt that there were not enough dollars per hour to pay anyone who considered it their right to be nasty enough to bring our Theta ladies to tears. (It was a different world back then.) It turned out that it was one dealer and about three or four customers were disrupting Theta’s business; a nasty client experience has a productivity hangover which persists after the fact. In all fairness, there were customers who could not deal with problems that were genuinely Theta’s fault without ire and dyspepsia, but in those cases it is up to us to make it right. It is just there were so many cases which were NOT our problem. We were NOT shrinks – that should have been the dealer’s responsibility. That is the only thing I miss about dealers from the Theta era.

    So I had one dealer I had to fire and several end users to fire along the way – the customers were all refunded in full (sometimes way in after the fact of purchase), bypassing the dealers if necessary, and all equipment (including demos) was repurchased from the one dealer I had to get rid of. Guess what! Life at the Theta shop became much better for everyone. I made firing Theta customers who were problems policy and factory life greatly improved. This was the genus of practice at Schiit today.

    This was before I realized I was dealing with Pareto’s principle. The 80/20 law. 20% of the clients are 80% of the customer service. The principle is also extensible; 4% are 96%, and 0.8% is 99.2%. It is the 0.8 percent who are the big burden – not just for us but for all other clients as well. It does consume resources which can ultimately affect prices. There are a very few who will never be happy and transfer that responsibility to their wives, their dwindling friends, or at the end of the road to customer service. Thank God such clients are rare.

    There are other situations which do result in high customer service burden. They tend to occur at the lower end of the spectrum. The only Schiit product which approaches this level would be the Fulla. This is a product which tends to attract newer users who may be have no real idea of what to expect in a high-end product. They enter our market with notions that are not based on prior experience with higher end products. They may lack experience in how to acquire the other proper components of the system. Some come in believing in audio fairy tales with expectations which match. In this case, we cannot be a school, but we can recommend meets and similar places to hang out if this is indeed an important avocation for them.

    I write this not to sound harsh, but as an explanation of how I want to treat the 99.4 per cent of users and do the maximum for them. It I a hobby and should be fun. If it is fun for us, it will be more fun for you. And now for a tip – if you are thinking about getting an Yggdrasil, you have about a 12 hour window to take advantage of a great time to buy.
     
  17. rlow

    rlow A happy woofer

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    Umm....whaaa?? Moar info please!\/
     
    Last edited: Jan 15, 2018
  18. jexby

    jexby Posole Prince

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    why would we need moar info? if you want a multibit Yggdrasil which slaughters the industry price vs. performance ratio,
    put Yggdrasil in your cart and buy now.

    if you want an Yggdrasil after it returns to delta sigma chips, with a switching power supply, singled ended outputs only, with no USB GenV input and sea foam green aluminum foil casing tomorrow- well, buy then. ;):D:p
     
  19. SnowPuppy

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    I am about 3-4 weeks from getting a Yggdrasil.
     
  20. captkirk

    captkirk Khan's BFF

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    I think that’s all we’re going to get.

    I think an upgrade is on the horizon, coupled with a price increase on the new Yggdrasil. So if you buy now, then perform upgrade, you’d probably come out ahead.

    Just a guess.
     

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