Schiit Eitr Preview Thread

Dear mods,

If I ever spend $600 on a USB cable please ban me.

DigMe

 

I spent about $300 on a USB cable and almost banned myself.....the problem is that it actually improved the sound so I don't feel bad about the purchase!

 

My two cents, because that’s what it’s worth. I went through cable nervosa about 15 years ago. Ended up trading in my Cardas interconnects and speaker cables for the ultimate sounding copper. $1200. The only difference was less money in my checking account. Crappy cables do cause a problem. Some are cheap. Some not. RF seems to be the major problem. If the cable is made of quality parts and cable, like Blue Jean uses, spending more doesn’t seem to offer sonic benefits. IMVHO. TBH I was sure for a couple of years that my expensive cables made a difference. If people hear a difference cool. But I think beyond a certain level of construction, the extra $$ could be better spent.

 

I try to keep cable nervosa to a minimum, All the cables in my system are Blue Jeans Cables with the exception of the AudioQuest Diamond USB. I use the stock cables that came with my HD800S and Elears. Blue Jeans is such a pleasure to work with because they ship quick.

 

If I ever spend $600 on any cable please shoot me in the face and harvest my organs.

 

Someone had posted a graph over on head-fi showing what might be about a 1 ohm impedance difference between some pricey cables, so proof of something, but...

The thing is, headphones aren't like speakers. They don't take up a lot of room, you can switch! Me, several hundred bucks can go toward buying another set of cans, such as the HP3s for me (I really want a good basshead set for those times when I'm in the mood for that deep reverb bass sound). New cans, an entirely different frequency response, impedance, very significant and measurable differences for my $'s.

Cables still remain last on my personal list of what I am going to spend $ on to improve/change the sound.

 

Taking this back to Eitr for a moment, does anyone happen to have a sense whether:

1. Eitr needs a certain amount of warm up time (e.g. to stabilize clocks etc)

2. Does it stay active/powered/warmed-up when not connected to a USB source (still plugged into wall wart the entire time however)?

Maybe only @schiit or @baldr or @SchiitFerBrainz could answer...

 

Just tried iMac USB out to > Eitr > Bitfrost vs iMac Optical out to Bitfrost and could not notice any difference. USB cable and Coax cables are not cheapo stock cables but all good quality ones and could not detect much sonic gain..... I guess that it will add more benefit with PC that has noisy USB out...

 

Torq said 5 minutes, and that the difference is minor.

 

Yes, there's a strong whiff of magical audio pebbles around here lately, from people with fanciful shamanic notions of how tech works. It's rather Head-Fi.

 

Where is Torq btw? Havent seen him here for a while.

 

He retired.

 

Did a bunch of A/B testing this weekend with my Pavane with and without the Eitr. Result was that I yanked the Eitr and am getting better SQ without it. This was prompted by some treble roughness on the USB feed that was irritating me - so I started trying different setups to address this - pulling the Eitr and running direct USB to my DAC was one of the first changes I tried. That worked.

I could have sworn that the Eitr made my SQ better before my DAC was recently upgraded (from Pavane Level 1 to Pavane Level 2). After the upgrade I am finding a better SQ without the Eitr.

Weird, I think. The Pavane upgrade from Level 1 to Level 2 didn't touch the USB implementation AFAIK.

I guess the lesson I take from that is that the Eitr (or any other gizmo in the USB chain) is not a guaranteed improvement to the SQ - it might help, but it might hurt also.

I remember trying the REGEN unit some time ago on another DAC and hating what it did to the SQ.

I will dig out my Singxer SU-1 and give that another try using the AES input to the DAC. Previously the Eitr did a better job than the SU-1, but things can change.

 

@TonyNewman If the on-board usb is good enough, bypassing it with Eitr can make it worse in some cases.

A good asynchronous USB receiver block will ignore all incoming jitter - right up until it drops out, basically - if the spdif in you're using instead doesn't clean jitter well, you can introduce a (very very small) amount by using Eitr in such situations.

Eitr's spdif out is very, very good for a unit of that price, but not quite totl pro digital interface good, so it all depends on the various abilities of the dac's inputs.

 

Thank you - that helps.

The bit I find strange is that before the pavane upgrade I was certain that the AES feed from the SU-1 was better than direct USB, and that the Eitr was better again. Post DAC upgrade and the direct USB is killing it. Very much so compared to the Eitr. My understanding is that the DAC upgrade made no change at all to the USB implementation inside the Pavane, so I am at a loss to explain why this is so.

Maybe I am over thinking all this? Just run with the best setup I can find and enjoy the music

 

That's usually a healthy outlook, so long as one stays wary of the 400$ elven-made usb cable trap

 

I only went the $300 Holy Unicorn Horn USB cable. I know when to stop

EDIT:

Apologies for going slightly OT - thought I should give a quick update on what happened with testing my Singxer SU-1 in place of the Eitr.

To my ears, using my DAC, Singxer AES >> USB >>> Eitr SPDIF.

I think this has more to do with my Pavane DAC liking AES than anything else.

Pity the Eitr doesn't have an AES out. That would be interesting.

 

You just need an impedance matching transformer: http://www.neutrik.com/en/accessories/aes-ebu-impedance-transformers/

 

Would you believe I have had a Neutrik AES/BNC converter-transformer sitting at the bottom of a drawer for months? I got lazy about getting the necessary connectors and forgot all about it. Thanks for the reminder.

 

Is Eitr working now completely correctly with iPhone(iPhone 6s)?