Schiit Urd Impressions

Was this digital-out or analogue-out from your Tascam? I presume the former but it's not explicit in your post (to me, anyway).

As the owner of non-Schiit / non-Unison DACs, I'm interested in this aspect. As people listen to their new Urds, I'd be grateful for more comparisons of CD out from Urd via coax or AES vs coax or AES out of other CD players/transports (mainly); and vs lossless rips of the same CDs via coax/AES out of whatever streamer (already had a couple of those). TIA.

 

pls exactly what Bio said for us who have other transports or non-Unison, hell, non-USB at all DACs.

 

I can’t tell the difference between Whizzo Butter and a dead crab.

And after listening to a little bit of classical this morning, SPDIF-into-Yggdrasil, I can’t say Urd and CXC can be trivially told apart.

I think I stand by my initial impression: The novelty here is Unison-to-Unison. Now that’s an IMAX moment (and I think we can all agree IMAX is not for every movie, or for everybody).

 

Aw heck, someone throw a Schiit Wyrd into the comparison just so we can see usb->usb vs usb->usb.

 

Yes, but we know from experience that in reality there is still a wide range of difference here. I'm not saying there are not some really good USB implementations out there, but it is a fair question as to whether Unison improves upon them. That is what it was designed to do, a lot of people think it indeed does. I'll have to wait till I can form my own opinion on that.

I thought that was the whole point.

I rip all my CDs to WAV. Storage is cheap these days, why do a compress/decompress action (even if it is lossless) if you don't have to? I guess that makes me OCD too. Never thought about it.

I assumed it was obvious, but yes digital out. Now that it is too hot out for the 2ch again I'm going to move my Urd downstairs and hook it up to my Bifrost. Then I can do some direct comparisons between SPDIF coax and Unison as both host and slave.

 

The argument I've heard is that the less "work" you make the computer do, the less cpu/power/witchcraft/noise will get into the circuitry which will affect the digital/analog/whatever-signal coming out. I can see some holistic merit to it. In practice, meh I dunno.

 

I just see it as reducing the likelihood of inadvertent errors.

 

I meant that in a joking manner (us audiophools tweaking all these things when normal people couldn't care less about going over 256kbps AAC) and to emphasize how meticulous Mike Moffat is about all these things. I don't own an Urd or a Red streamer, just a "lowly" Pi2AES which does sound different from PC>Unison on my Bifrost 2 OG. Technically @Armaegis is correct, less processing = less noise, but just about anything you do on an OS related to the browser or a modern application takes more processing than decoding FLAC, and with players like Audirvana the FLAC decoding is done before the track starts and the resulting WAV buffered to RAM so FLAC decoding noise shouldn't matter during playback.

I do however find it a bit arrogant to assume the Red would have less noise when it has a Pi chip running Linux. Audibility is up for debate but after the Pi2AES changed my mind about "bits are bits", I am mildly intrigued by what a truly task-specific transport like the Urd can do in terms of electrical noise and jitter.

 

I'm trying my hardest not to clutter this thread, but just lending my input on the FLAC vs WAV difference since I went through months-long testing on these and eventually settled on WAV's, despite their larger size...The difference is subtle at first, but especially in busy parts (think thin guitar leads or even poorly mixed drums), WAV's come through cleaner, faster and actually a tad brighter. Easier to separate the individual parts. Going back to FLAC makes them seem dull and harder to identify individual song parts. Still totally listenable, but my brain works harder to make out the songs and listening fatigue sets in sooner. WAV's are more effortless to listen to. It's POSSIBLE that FLAC decoders have improved over the last few years (I want to say I did this back in 2018?) and/or lower compression FLAC's yield better results, but I'm sticking with Team WAV.

To tie this back to this comparison/impressions thread, I think a true comparison would have to be WAV's vs CD output (which are basically WAV files). I suspect CD vs FLAC would give the CD a very real edge in almost every match-up. Also, this is for local files obviously. Not sure what Spotify or other services use for their format.

Edit: Testing methodology was taking a 1000+ tracklist of favorite songs I know, largely videogame music, heavy metal and classic rock, listened to it for a about a month in FLAC, then converted it to WAV and listened to it for about a month. Was pleased enough with the results to stick with WAV's moving forward for album rips and both critical and casual listening.

 

This I find hard to understand. Isn’t the PCM stream identical after file processing? (Hence the “Lossless” term). Wave is just a file format to store the audio stream in, there’s nothing being changed in the stream.

 

No worries, I did not take it personally and actually it is nice to know I am in good company in any case I agree with the less processing equals less noise in theory, I doubt it means much in practice. If it does, then it probably would apply more than anything to Rpis, which are already know to be rather noisy and/or sensitive. I use an Rpi to integrate my pre-internet era home alarm system with the internet and the Python code has to have carefully written checks because otherwise I get a lot of false alarms from spurious signals on the monitored GPIO pins from things like the dishwasher in the next room. I'd like to build a Pi2AES, it is on my list, but Rpis are still kind of Unobtanium here unless you want to pay grossly inflated prices.

The other thing to consider would be implementation errors. The FLAC algorithm is well studied and accepted to be lossless, but that does not mean every application that uses it is, just as it is quite possible to take a well studied and accepted as secure cryptographic algorithm and implement it in a way as to make it highly insecure. It is easy enough to just avoid the whole question by not doing it.

 

I suspect because the conversion is happening in real time, the processing unit doesn't work as hard with WAV's (a case of having more headroom) and possibly reduces jitter. Not interested in the science behind it. I just know audibly, there was enough of a difference to make me rethink my listening habits. I encourage people to A-B FLAC vs WAV for themselves over an extended period of time to see for themselves.

 

The Urd likely has a superior power supply when compared to some of these streamers. I heard a big difference when I put @atomicbob 's noise nuke in my chain between my Pi2AES and stock PS. It might not be a reduction of jitter or some other bits-are-not-just-bits secret sauce that has folks thinking that the Urd sounds better than various streamers.

 

For those comparing spdif to unison (both into, say, Yggdrasil): focus on string plucks (harps preferably).

You will hear an obvious difference once you get past the better separation shock.

 

I think modern xmos solutions and the like eliminate these issues. I use my Auralic Vega with the exact clock precision mode no matter what I'm doing, and I used to have to use my win10 PC in specific ways to stop it from skipping, but a ddc with an xmos xu208 stopped all issues. I play games and watch YouTube with exact clock on (the manual even says it won't work with gaming PC's, and indeed didn't back in 2013).

Does Schiit unison have similar computing power to an xmos xu208? I think part of it is just that the xmos chip is octo-core and has a lot of cache

Edit: and this is with 16ft total of USB cable, most of that being an active 3.0 extension cable.

Also, I shouldn've mentioned that I've used two ddc's with xmos xu208's, one with normal clocks and one with femtoclocks, and both are exactly as stable with the Vega's exact clock, but the femtoclocked one sounds a bit better.

 

Ok, so I tried this setup last night and I was hard pressed to tell a difference between Red USB direct to Yiggy, compared to Red USB to Urd, then to Yiggy. It doesn't sound worse, which is a good thing. Red's USB already sounded great and I ended up prefering it to AES and RCA Coax to Yiggy in the past few months.

Urd playing CDs -> USB out ->USB in -> Yiggy still takes first place for me. IMO and in my specific system. More CDs coming in the mail today to do more comparisons. Tool's AEnema, Wet Leg, Radio Head's KID A Mnesia, and Cracker Island by Gorillaz.

 

USB packets may be sent out of order in bulk data transfer mode, such as to USB Mass Storage Class devices. However, the USB Audio standard uses isochronous data transfer which is a real-time streaming mode. Data is sent at exactly the audio data rate, packets must be in correct order, and there is no time for transmission error retry because new data keeps streaming in at real time (think of it like a live feed from a microphone).

https://www.edn.com/fundamentals-of-usb-audio/

 

"Lowly" pi2aes vs one of the greatest transports ever made, the venerable (and ultra-unobtainium) CDM 9 Pro. Dam. This is the most most under-the-radar gem in the entire post (he's said this before, too).

Marv got great taste (and also T.Swifts, is not a snob), confirmed. (Anyone notice I left out the Smiths? I left out the Smiths.)

This should be a good read!! V interested to hear how it compares to your Theta and or Urd in isolation by itself.