Yggdrasil Refined - New Schiit Yggdrasil Analog 2 (Yggdrasil A2) Sound Impressions

Good choice. Just expect it to sound like utter crap when cold. At this point, 3 days later, I've reached my end of the line gear. I am stunned at how much of an improvement A2 is.

 

Looking at my mess of notes since plugging in Yggdrasil-B on April 10, I realize I'm not going to write a coherent overview of what I've heard. So I'm going to just throw out a few of my thoughts on what this dac is doing for me; in other words, why I own it. The system remains as it's been since 2016, Redbook files, Audirvana+ player, Dante Ethernet via unDAES-O to Yggdrasil AES.

In my system, Yggdrasil-B checks off some incremental improvements over "A". A touch of cloud cover removed. More transparency, without ANY penalty of edginess. This allows even truer timbre, texture, touch. In space. Bill Frisell 'Music IS', huge differences between tracks, guitars, and playing, all over the place yet glued together in one album. Oded Tzur, sax smoky & woody, then screaming. Perfect human voices from Opus 7 Vocal Ensemble takes me to when I heard them in cathedral.

Interactions between musicians never seemed so alive before, call and response so personal. James Blood Ulmer & Charles Burnham. I have now been moved from foot tapping to foot stomping. Which will continue nonstop for about 45 minutes since I cued up Billy Joe Shaver's 'Unshaven' with late son Eddy's Stratocaster so present. How does such a clean presentation become more honky tonk raunchy than I ever heard it?

This dac teases out lines of musicians, say in a quartet, to a much greater degree. So I don't work at all to follow them. Hard to describe how. I don't think it's as simple as just a "bigger soundstage" or "placement of instruments". The stark transparency helps. But I actually think a lot of it gets back to true timbre. We all know a guitar playing a note sounds different than a piano playing the same note. But now, the guitar, horn, piano, bass, in Jim Hall's Concierto (not a great "audiophile" recording) show their extremely diverse tonalities, so I end up completely caught up in where each of these musicians is going.

Bass foundation cradles the whole Kirov Orchestra (Rite of Spring) with relaxed, graceful micro dynamics - genuine gravity before the thunder. I don't know how this dac gets the rifle shot percussion attack, with searingly intense leading edge and slam, without a TRACE of "HiFi bright", and simultaneously brings in the soothing roundness of sax with Charles Lloyd New Quartet.

I called the improvements "incremental". I guess that means I was totally satisfied with Yggdrasil-A. But now I'm "more totally" satisfied, and thrilled with Yggdrasil-B. With no effort on my part, every piece I listen to is a rich and varied composite of each musician's performance. So everything I cue up turns out to be just what I wanted to listen to!

 

"I have now been moved from foot tapping to foot stomping."
hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

JJ

 

Thank you for the Kirov Orchestra recommendation, getting it! In exchange, here are a few Yggdrasil-B listens that opened up something new for me (going downstairs to listen to "Music IS" which I've not yet run through it):

"Still Dreaming" Joshua Redman
"Goldberg Variations" Jory Vinikour
"Vira Loucos" Cyro Baptista
"Seymour Reads the Constitution!" Brad Mehldau Trio
"Currents, Constellations" Nels Cline 4

 

Now that I had the Yggdrasil A2 from a while I've re compared it to the Pavane.
Basically most of my previous complaints have gone away. I feel the Yggdrasil A2 is closed to the Pavane than Yggdrasil.
Most important the slight grain I heard in treble is now gone, the mids are 5%(if you can put a number) behind the Pavane.
Where before I would have said the Pavane is better and the Yggdrasil just behind I find now the Yggdrasil A2 is just a different flavour without any technical issues.
It was a lot harder to compare these two but
- Yggdrasil still has a slight tendency to accentuate the high end. Some tracks sound airier because of this and some with HD800/K1K can still be pushed over the edge for me especially on less than ideal recordings. At least this time the detail retrieval is the same but just a bit more in your face on the Yggdrasil A2(some may prefer this).
- pavane has 1% more forward vocals which I prefer(no idea what number to put on this since the difference is so small)
- bass seems about the same on control and weight and an improvement over the Yggdrasil
- pavane still has the wider soundstage
- pavane has better single ended out than Yggdrasil/Yggdrasil A2

An interesting experiment, at one point I though all dacs sound the same but without an uber resolving system most don't know what they're missing. At least this way I won't have any remorse about selling it a second time. I don't see any reason why I should keep it since there isn't anything that it does better than the pavane(for my tastes, I haven't heard everything bla bla bla)

Congrads to schiit, they could have sold this as a new dac and I would have believed them. In this world of over 1k tubes and cables having this sort of upgrade for half that gives me hope for the future of this hobby.

 

f**k it sounds like I really need to hear a Pavane as most of your thoughts mirror mine with Yggdrasil. I assume you have L3?

 

L2. I didn't want to pay extra for the L3 when I got it. If you have time to come to the UK mini meet you can hear both side by side. After that the little piggy is going to market.

 

Much agreement with this. It's minor, but it's also not. It's the difference between this is a good digital reproduction of music, and 'this is very close to sounding like live/real music'.

I've never heard the Pavane so can make no comparison, but the slight accentuation of the highs (agree with this trait) I'm polishing off with select tubes on the amp side.

Indeed congrats to Schiit for elevating Yggdrasil's sonic character without losing any of it's previous (e.g., lively) traits.

 

@m17xr2b How's the stage depth compared with your Pavane?

 

No idea. I'll have to check this on the Stratus/Stellaris as the Teton doesn't do depth as well. On the teton I can switch sources in an instant. With the Stratus I have to turn down the volume, unplug the headphones, switch the input at the back and reverse.
From memory the Pavane is better than Yggdrasil but I haven't listened critically with Stratus/Yggdrasil A2.

 

So on the Stratus the differences are quite obvious

Spoiler: Chain

Both fed from the same Lynx AES16 card with LPS and everything from the P12
Wywires silver mains cable->Pavane L2(single ended)->Wywires platinum IC->Stratus
DIY furutech cable->Yggdrasil A2->Wywires platinum(XLR)->Jensen isomax->Wywires silver IC->Stratus

The pavane presents a better 3d image of the sound, the Yggdrasil A2 is flatter. On the Yggdrasil A2 most thing I perceive as being on the same plane. On the pavane you get a better sense of localisation of what is behind/in front of everything else.
This is mostly obvious with recordings that have a large orchestra in the background.

So on this front looks like Yggdrasil=Yggdrasil A2

 

I'm very content 1+ week in. I had a lot of criticism of the Utopia in the Utopia thread, but the vast majority of my annoyances with those HPs are resolved with this upgrade to Yggdrasil. I'd like to hear the pavane, but really cannot find any fault worth mentioning anymore with my chain as-is.

My chain is probably not the most liquid sounding, but it has been a long time since I've heard live music that wasn't amplified, so I expect to hear that amplification too (and that is coming through). Even my HEX V2 headphones sound like music now. Plenty of slam, dynamics, as it should be, but I'm at the limits of what I can hear in terms of detail and analog smoothness. Then again my ears aren't what they use to be when I was younger, so maybe someone who can hear those higher frequencies can hear the overtones, and the subtle details that, I believe, affect our sense of hearing space.

 

Even with my old ears, Yggdrasil-B's truer timbre is apparent. (Even though my high freq hearing likely measures poorly). It also helps, as @atomicbob recently commented, to get out and listen to real instruments often. I think we continue to "learn" to hear.

 

An update -

Yggdrasil-B sounds like garbage out of the cold box, and likewise, it got very humid and warm here the other day, plus I had been working my PC and graphics card hard, so 90F in the room. Could have been my mood, but I wasn't loving the sound at that temperature either. Perhaps it's just the DACs, they have an optimal temperature range?

But other then the sensitivity to temperature range, I really can find no fault in Yggdrasil-B. It's still lively, dynamic, but the update also removes a little haze, treble grain, and tilts the the balance from slightly metallic, to just sounds like music. I can live with this sound for a long time. I wouldn't mind a touch more romanticism, but if I make a change there, it will be on the AMP side, or transducers. Easier to subtract/color information than to try to retrieve what isn't there to begin with.

 

How many hours on your Yggdrasil A2?
JJ

 

One of the coolest things about Yggdrasil A2, to me, is the stage. The Mjolnir2 though, and I used one myself for over a year until recently, isn't known to have much depth to its presentation. I'm pretty sure that there's more to what that Yggdrasil A2 can do when paired with a big tube amp than what you're getting out if now. What I mean is that there's more to look forward to.

 

@johnjen - 2.5 weeks, 4-6hrs a day play time.

@BillOhio - Yes, down the road, but I'm slowly starting to eye those TOTL tube amps. Going to enjoy what I have in the mean time, listening (and re-listening) to my favorite music.

 

@Darren G is your Yggdrasil A2 on continuously?

And when I hit ≈125hrs playing time, there was a marked step up in SQ on my upgraded Yggdrasil A2.

JJ

 

When I went from A1 to A2, I did the spontaneous (stupid? smart?) think of ordering an entirely new A2, rather than sending in my A1 for an upgrade. I wanted to compare them head-to-head, for my own pleasure and general masturbatory audiophile edification. Going into it, I was honestly perfectly willing to return the A1 and eat the restocking fee. My A1 already had the Gen5, so the only difference was the new analog board.

After a few hours of warmup, I was thinking I strongly preferred A1. The A1 (which hadn’t been turned off for at least six months) seemed to have more air and sense of space compared to the A2. But very quickly (within 72 hours, IIRC), the A2 leapfrogged over the A1. It became more lively and the perceived initial flatness of the sound turned into the blacker background that people refer to when talking about the A2. The loss of grain/improved smoothness also was very apparent listening to the same short pieces of music going back Andy forth between the A1 and A2.

This warmup was much faster and much different from the A1 in my experience, which initially sounded thin and grainy compared to the Master 7 I had at the time. It took at least a week of warmup, if not longer, before I felt absolutely confident that the Yggy1 was the superior DAC and the one I wanted to keep.