LOL in all seriousness, do you notice any difference between SE and balanced on the Yggdrasil? I've always used balanced on my Yggdrasil A1, but I'm contemplating some amp changes which could necessitate SE outs. I suspect that the concerns about the SE outs are overblown.
From the balanced amps I’ve tried, the difference was pretty negligible to my ears. Also, not sure I can attribute that to the Yggdrasil or the amp. Most balanced amps are likely optimized for that operation, so you may lose something on the amp side using SE inputs. It’s a chicken or egg thing. Only having SE amps now saves me even having to think or worry about that :-)
I couldn’t help my curiosity/nervosa and got some used Cardas FXLR-FRCA (pin 3 float) adapters for LIM. Nothing blew up into Studio B, no obvious noise. I… think I like it more. :( It’s more a different “flavor” than an upgrade, though. This would make it BAL w/ adapter >= SE >> Radial Twin ISO for me. Hated the Radial, sold it. Overall, it’s nervosa.
I think it’s most skillful to look at small differences/“tweaks” like these like a hardware-based tone control. It’s just another way to tune the rig to your preferences, not necessarily “improve” anything. You can make something upstream sound “better” to you by changing something downstream, for instance, and messing with what is upstream can throw that off kilter.
Be careful with pin float cables. I used one from the Yggdrasil to the Liquid Glass and while it ran well most of the time sometimes DC would go over to the Glass,
triggering the protection circuit.
The only fix was a reboot of the Yggdrasil. Having to hear the protection is not something really pleasant but thankfully the Glass
does have DC protection since DC can kill your headphones easily. Ultimately this is what atomicbob and others always warned of.
Unfortunately, running Yggdrasil GS, I definitely can hear a difference using balanced or SE out. The balanced out is better even though the output is going to Freya S versus SE out directly. And I mean this from a sense of plankton (which I kind of whore myself out for)
@Huhnkopf yeah I did quite a bit of reading beforehand before biting the bullet, including of bob’s threads and comments, which were very helpful, and an old thread on here for XLR to RCA cables, so I was aware of the risk. Thanks for more data though on use of them with Yggdrasil.
What ultimately pushed me over the edge of not worrying too much was this (rather old, unsure what he would think now) reply of Jason’s/Schiit support in the HF Yggdrasil thread: https://www.head-fi.org/threads/schiit-yggdrasil-impressions-thread.766347/page-30#post-11778417. That plus the Studio B having OPT’s, in my head, lowered my sense of risk. I still think caution is needed for unknown quantities though
I noticed differences with the A1/GS but i dont with the A2 or the LIM, at least with my current gear, which make me glad since most of my favourite amps are SE only.
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