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Budget DAC Review: Schiit Modi 2 ($99)

Blumlein 88

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["Right now, I swear, Schiit Audio's Mike Moffat and Jason Stoddard are sitting there in California, smugly smirking at me and John Atkinson. While JA was struggling to properly measure Schiit's Ragnarok (Fate of the Gods) integrated amplifier for my review in the May 2016 issue, I sent Moffat an e-mail: "Are you smiling?"

"Yup," he replied. He'd known in advance that the Ragnarok wouldn't look good on standard tests. But he hadn't warned us: The Ragnarok's output-stage bias program responds to music sources, not signal generators. "]


Is this a planned approach to further the audiohool agenda, pushing the position that science is useless in revealing what their magic dust products sound like?

Among other things yes. The pity is they have a fanatical following making sub-standard or problematic gear. I think Behringer should come out with an audiophile DAC only for about $150.

Behringer TP-1 DAC. What every audiophile needs to wipe that Schiit off their system.
 

Jinjuku

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The oppo Blu-ray player that I tore down, see http://audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/inside-of-a-premium-blu-ray-player.55/, had cheap Chinese electroylitic capacitors. So unless the DAC is different, they are cutting corners which will impact longevity.

I'm not picking the Sonica out as a prime example. What I'm getting at is you can only design for a particular application so much.

When I wrote the recurring billing engine for one of our products I could only code it so well for billing to recur on the selected absolute day of the month I wanted the charge to apply. Once I have the algorithm working and doing what it's supposed to do it isn't like a Cutler, or Tevian, or Sassenthrath, who are certainly better devs, could write it any better.

The code works, it's been optimized and doesn't matter if the product is $500 or $5000 they are both going to do the SAME exact thing.

It's at this point all things simply are equal.
 
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Jinjuku

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If you engineer a circuit so that it meets the requirements of a standard testing regime, nothing. If you want the component in the context of the system it forms part of, and in all the environments it finds itself, to correctly perform then a great deal more might be required.

IOW, should it be "just good enough" to keep the 'right' people happy, or should it be robust enough so that it always performs at optimum, no matter "what's thrown at it"?

That's bullshit. In the context of a DAC the standards of consumer and pro-level I/O dictate design. It's called a standard for a reason.

If you are paying through the nose for poorly designed equipment that requires something else in chain to be overbuilt to compensate who is the fool in this scenario?
 

Blumlein 88

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That's bullshit. In the context of a DAC the standards of consumer and pro-level I/O dictate design. It's called a standard for a reason.

If you are paying through the nose for poorly designed equipment that requires something else in chain to be overbuilt to compensate who is the fool in this scenario?

I'm afraid in one sense the unfortunate answer is the fool is the manufacturer who does not take advantage of that situation to profit from the expected need to clean something up to just a little more pristine than pristine. At least in the high end world of audiophilia that is how it works.

It really is an extreme mind boggling irony. Way back when before digital, the less in the signal path the better. Whether needed or not I think of when pre-amps came out without tone controls because the idea of passing thru one thing un-needed was anathema as it might harm sound quality. Now with digital we really do have ways of doing all sorts of transformations and transmissions without hurting sound quality. What happens now? The idea seems to be the more gadgets and processes your have in the way to actively clean up the better. The idea of simply sticking a USB cable to a DAC is fraught with difficulty and gnashing of teeth. The audiophool has to have several devices to clean, re-clean, isolate and further isolate the end signal from its origination point. So surreal.
 

Sal1950

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I'm afraid in one sense the unfortunate answer is the fool is the manufacturer who does not take advantage of that situation to profit from the expected need to clean something up to just a little more pristine than pristine.
MQA? :)
 

Cosmik

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If you engineer a circuit so that it meets the requirements of a standard testing regime, nothing. If you want the component in the context of the system it forms part of, and in all the environments it finds itself, to correctly perform then a great deal more might be required.

IOW, should it be "just good enough" to keep the 'right' people happy, or should it be robust enough so that it always performs at optimum, no matter "what's thrown at it"?
I think what you are saying is the exact opposite of the 'boutique' audio industry. 'Pro' gear is designed to keep working when abused, whereas much audiophile stuff is just one slightly adverse condition away from destroying the speakers.
 

fas42

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I think what you are saying is the exact opposite of the 'boutique' audio industry. 'Pro' gear is designed to keep working when abused, whereas much audiophile stuff is just one slightly adverse condition away from destroying the speakers.
I'm not talking about meatheads dropping the gear from a height onto the concrete floor, or running with every red light on the front flashing in panic mode. Rather, whether the subjective performance is invariant no matter what the electical environment is - say, plug a heavy duty arc welder into the power socket next to the one used by the rig, and turn up the amps! If I couldn't pick a variation in the SQ, then I would be impressed ... ;)
 

Cosmik

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I'm not talking about meatheads dropping the gear from a height onto the concrete floor, or running with every red light on the front flashing in panic mode.
Neither am I.
Rather, whether the subjective performance is invariant no matter what the electical environment is - say, plug a heavy duty arc welder into the power socket next to the one used by the rig, and turn up the amps! If I couldn't pick a variation in the SQ, then I would be impressed ... ;)
What makes you think a boutique device will meet that requirement?! They are probably using 'point-to-point' wiring because it is more musical than a PCB, or some rubbishy two layer board. The obsession with 'discrete' circuits increases the pick-up of RFI because the paths are longer. They will probably have less EMI protection because of a desire to keep the signal paths 'simpler' - or because they don't know how to do it. They will avoid fault protection at the output of amps because they don't want to put anything else in the signal path - and it's a difficult thing to make foolproof, anyway, and probably beyond their capabilities.
 

fas42

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Neither am I.

What makes you think a boutique device will meet that requirement?! They are probably using 'point-to-point' wiring because it is more musical than a PCB, or some rubbishy two layer board. The obsession with 'discrete' circuits increases the pick-up of RFI because the paths are longer. They will probably have less EMI protection because of a desire to keep the signal paths 'simpler' - or because they don't know how to do it. They will avoid fault protection at the output of amps because they don't want to put anything else in the signal path - and it's a difficult thing to make foolproof, anyway, and probably beyond their capabilities.
Have I stated that boutique/expensive components would do that? A simple counter example I heard recently was a Sony Wireless "packet of biscuits" all-in-one, at the audio friend's home. A marvel of miniaturisation, just feed it via Bluetooth - on soft jazz, beat the pants of most audiophile setups I've come across; limitations were volume, and bass of course, and the treble needed a touch more refinement. At the other end of the open lounge area, big, full sound - would have easily fooled lots of people in this game.

So, almost trivially easy to get half reasonable sound these days, for peanuts, if one buys intelligently. The next trick, is to get it to scale up - can it go loud, can it handle high density, high energy rock, can it do pipe organ at reasonable volumes? - this is where engineering has to put on its hard hat, and tackle it properly.

Fashion audio is fine as a hobby, but if one wants to get it 'right' then the 'right' attitude is needed, to make it happen.
 

watchnerd

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I'm not talking about meatheads dropping the gear from a height onto the concrete floor, or running with every red light on the front flashing in panic mode. Rather, whether the subjective performance is invariant no matter what the electical environment is - say, plug a heavy duty arc welder into the power socket next to the one used by the rig, and turn up the amps! If I couldn't pick a variation in the SQ, then I would be impressed ... ;)

For those rare welding-shop / recording studio combos?

I don't get the real world use case behind this ludicrous hypothetical.
 

Blumlein 88

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For those rare welding-shop / recording studio combos?

I don't get the real world use case behind this ludicrous hypothetical.

Well there was that Mark Levinson ML2 review by Audio magazine. They used it to weld together some steel plates without mishap or complaint from the amp. So this is a case where when you plug in your amplifier you have plugged in an arc welder. Does that count for Frank, or does it have to be an all in one home theater box from Best Buy?

ML2b.JPG


I had the little brother ML-9 at one time. I really liked the Camac connectors for the input. They never caught on outside the French nuclear reactor instrumentation field though.

ML-9+inside-top2.jpg
 
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RayDunzl

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RayDunzl

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I read some "Listening to music while welding" posts elsewhere.

The complaints were:

The Safety Folks putting in their 2 cents...

The folks whose employers didn't permit it.

And the only real audio complaint I saw was from a guy trying to listen to AM Talk Radio.

I didn't get a sense that they were critically listening, though. Except the guy listening to Rush.
 

Sal1950

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I had the little brother ML-9 at one time.
Damn, Now that a set of capacitors!

I remember that Audio ML welderup review.
Ray's got the cables too, all ya need is the ground clamp and electrode holder.
Z0t93tlcpEx_.JPG
 

fas42

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For those rare welding-shop / recording studio combos?

I don't get the real world use case behind this ludicrous hypothetical.
Very simple. It's a stress test, to reveal competence of engineering - something used, say in the airline industry - you load up a wing in a test rig until it breaks; that way, you know whether it can handle a severe bout of turbulence without problems. Placing things into "ludicrous" scenarios can tell one a lot - as an example, I would run a system at high levels on 'difficult' recordings; that tells me immediately where the weaknesses are, what the signature characteristics of its sound are - now attuned to where it's deficient, one can relatively easily hear the same behaviour occurring in a much more subtle fashion, when using the system "normally".
 

fas42

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Damn, Now that a set of capacitors!
Might look impressive, but these big muthas are usually a poor choice. The big Perreaux I have was crippled by using such beasties; took throwing them in the bin, so to speak, and replacing with smarter parts to get the performance right.
 

Palladium

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["Right now, I swear, Schiit Audio's Mike Moffat and Jason Stoddard are sitting there in California, smugly smirking at me and John Atkinson. While JA was struggling to properly measure Schiit's Ragnarok (Fate of the Gods) integrated amplifier for my review in the May 2016 issue, I sent Moffat an e-mail: "Are you smiling?"

"Yup," he replied. He'd known in advance that the Ragnarok wouldn't look good on standard tests. But he hadn't warned us: The Ragnarok's output-stage bias program responds to music sources, not signal generators. "]


Is this a planned approach to further the audiohool agenda, pushing the position that science is useless in revealing what their magic dust products sound like?

You gotta hand it to Schitt though, they know how to strike a gold mine with the audiophools. It's utterly trivial and cheap in an EE context to take off-the-shelf chips and turn it into an end product that doesn't sound like complete crap to the ear since the big semicon design firms have already done 99% of the hard work, and if audible design flaws did exist it can be marketed with the usual weasel words and "measurements don't matter" which the crowd would happily drink the Kool-Aid. :D
 

watchnerd

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You gotta hand it to Schitt though, they know how to strike a gold mine with the audiophools. It's utterly trivial and cheap in an EE context to take off-the-shelf chips and turn it into an end product that doesn't sound like complete crap to the ear since the big semicon design firms have already done 99% of the hard work, and if audible design flaws did exist it can be marketed with the usual weasel words and "measurements don't matter" which the crowd would happily drink the Kool-Aid. :D

All true, but that's not what Schiit did with the Yggdrasil DAC They didn't use audio off-the-shelf sigma delta DACs. They used 20bit DACs designed for medical imaging, which were quite a bit more expensive.

Whether that was a smart decision, from an engineering POV, is debatable. From a marketing POV, it seems clever.
 

Palladium

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Of course it has to be some exotic expensive DAC chip, because expensive = always better and being utterly off the beaten path will give the product the magical sonical properties and instant audiophilia street cred which the target audience craves.
 

watchnerd

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Of course it has to be some exotic expensive DAC chip, because expensive = always better and being utterly off the beaten path will give the product the magical sonical properties and instant audiophilia street cred which the target audience craves.

Oh, it's even worse than that....it's not just more expensive, it's R2R. Moffat / Schiit claim that DS/SD DACs/ADCs "destroy the original samples".

Which, even if true, is moot because virtually all pro ADCs are SD designs, so if that data is lost, it's lost forever...it's not going to be magically restored by some R2R DAC.
 
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