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Budget DAC Review: Schiit Modi 2 ($99)

Pedro Janeiro

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Hi Everyone,

Im new in this forum, and have some questions.
I recently bought the Grado Gh2, and after some online research i was interested in buy the Schiit Valhalla 2, and Bifrost multibit, but recently i found this forum and my doubts about the dac increased.
@amirm what do you will recommend? do you think the Topping dx7s will be better than the Valhalla 2 + Bifrost mb, or maybe the Valhalla 2 + Topping d30 will be better choice?
I think a warmer amp will pair better with Grado, but my main concern right now is about the dac.
Any help about this or other products are welcome!

Thanks

Pedro
 

Dialectic

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Hi Everyone,

Im new in this forum, and have some questions.
I recently bought the Grado Gh2, and after some online research i was interested in buy the Schiit Valhalla 2, and Bifrost multibit, but recently i found this forum and my doubts about the dac increased.
@amirm what do you will recommend? do you think the Topping dx7s will be better than the Valhalla 2 + Bifrost mb, or maybe the Valhalla 2 + Topping d30 will be better choice?
I think a warmer amp will pair better with Grado, but my main concern right now is about the dac.
Any help about this or other products are welcome!

Thanks

Pedro

In general, if you care about good engineering and manufacturing quality, avoid products made by Schiit.

As Amir has demonstrated, the Topping DX7 and DX7S are excellent DACs (regardless of price), but the high output impedance of their headphone amplifiers could cause problems with frequency response in certain headphones. If the impedance of the Grado headphones does not vary with frequency, the DX7 or DX7S probably will work fine and, in any event, will sound better than any similarly priced Schiit product.
 
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Dana reed

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Hi Everyone,

Im new in this forum, and have some questions.
I recently bought the Grado Gh2, and after some online research i was interested in buy the Schiit Valhalla 2, and Bifrost multibit, but recently i found this forum and my doubts about the dac increased.
@amirm what do you will recommend? do you think the Topping dx7s will be better than the Valhalla 2 + Bifrost mb, or maybe the Valhalla 2 + Topping d30 will be better choice?
I think a warmer amp will pair better with Grado, but my main concern right now is about the dac.
Any help about this or other products are welcome!

Thanks

Pedro
I have a bifrost multibit and lyr2 in my living room and use it quite a bit with my grado Gs2000e, which have the same impedance as the GH2. I really enjoy the sound of this combo. As to multibit vs anything else, I've not discovered the magic that many at others at other forums may have described, and have gone as far as setting up an A/B rig to test this on many different songs (attached pic with modi2uber and modi2 multibit fed via spdif and then using the sys to A/B them into a magni3) I cannot tell the difference, level matched, between these.
Of course measurements are another thing altogether and the multibit (especially the bifrost and modi) definitely do not have the dynamic range of a d/s., but I suppose neither do my ears. And as to THD, well, if you cared about distortion, you'd pick another headphone than a Grado, which measure crazy high in the 10% range at low frequencies. Any headphone/speaker is going to have loads more distortion than what some of the worst DACs have so it would be hard, IMHO, to find differences in listening tests between many DACs
The grados at 32 Ohm, as mentioned before, might have trouble with an amp of higher than 3ish Ohms. The Valhalla is 3.5 in low gain and the dx7 is 10 Ohm. But if you want to use an OTL amp, the Valhalla has one of the lower impedances as most are best with 300 Ohm Sennheisers and 600 Ohm Beyerdynamics. (The latter of which, I also love with my Lyr2. I have never liked the HD600 though, on anything I've paired it with)
IMG_0540.jpg
 

Pedro Janeiro

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Thanks for the messages.

So looks i don't need worry to much about the dacs right? any of those will work just fine?
About the amp, any of you know at a reasonable price, a good tube amp for low impedance headphones?
 

Dana reed

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For the DAC, it might also depend if USB only is ok for you, or if you also need optical and/or coaxial inputs. As mentioned here, some DACs like the Modi, have poor isolation from the USB source. Whether you will hear it is another matter. I use a powered hub typically between the source and the DAC for that reason and also because some DACs (modi included) will give you an error for power draw if you connect an iPhone or other mobile device directly. For home use, I typically use a PC or streamer (even a cheap one like an airport express) that I can control via phone without having to connect the phone physically.

For a tube amp, I'd not recommend a true OTL tube amp for low impedance headphones, since they tend to have pretty high output impedance. There are several hybrid tube amps out there. The only ones I have experience with are Hifiman and Schiit. The Schiit Vali2 is the cheapest, and I've use that with Grados. It did help on some songs to take off some of the treble harshness that grados (especially my sr325e) can have. Of course you could also use EQ to do that and save on tubes. Even with my Lyr2 I switched to their LISST "tubes" which basically makes it a solid state amp, as the main reason I wanted that amp is to power HE6.
 

Svperstar

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I own the Modi 2 Multibit and I would love to see it tested vs the Yaggi just to see how a $250 DAC does against their top of the line.
 
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amirm

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I will be testing it. Plan is to test it against the other two Modis though but you can compare the graphs to Yggy when it is done.

Welcome to the forum by the way.
 

Ron Texas

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About 2 years ago I briefly had a Modi 2 Uber. If I did not disconnect it when rebooting my computer it would give a transient pop as loud as a shotgun blast. I don't mind a little pop or two, but that was insane. They told me I was supposed to have a preamp between it and my power amp. Fortunately, they took it back without a restocking fee, but I lost shipping both ways.

Schiit has a lot of fans. Perhaps all the jitter and distortion is providing some kind of satisfaction to it's owners. Beats me.
 

Dialectic

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Schiit has a lot of fans. Perhaps all the jitter and distortion is providing some kind of satisfaction to it's owners. Beats me.

Buyer's remorse is powerful. As we've seen, the Schiit quality of Schiit products triggers strong defensive reactions in some Schiit purchasers.

The more holes that Amir can punch in Schiit's marketing, the better. Let's hope the two knuckleheads who run that operation are out of the industry soon.
 

Ron Texas

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Buyer's remorse is powerful. As we've seen, the Schiit quality of Schiit products triggers strong defensive reactions in some Schiit purchasers.

The more holes that Amir can punch in Schiit's marketing, the better. Let's hope the two knuckleheads who run that operation are out of the industry soon.
That's a bit on the extreme side. A better explanation is some have a taste for a sound that is probably muddied up by distortion. The Yaggi is still getting rave reviews, most recently from Steve Guttenberg. I'm not attacking Amir's measurements or defending Schiit. The whole thing is puzzling. My best explanation to date is it's the emperor's clothes.
 

Sal1950

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That's a bit on the extreme side. A better explanation is some have a taste for a sound that is probably muddied up by distortion. The Yaggi is still getting rave reviews, most recently from Steve Guttenberg. I'm not attacking Amir's measurements or defending Schiit. The whole thing is puzzling. My best explanation to date is it's the emperor's clothes.
Same can be said for the reviewers and fans of things like SET tube amps, etc. It is entirely their right to enjoy the sound of these components and even recommend their purchase. Problem enters when big name reveiwers and big name magazines portray these pieces as SOTA HiFi offering clearer windows to the source, veils lifted, and all that BS. Only at Stereophile, if you know how to read between the lines of John Atkinson's measurements, can you learn of the SQ weaknesses in these units.
 

Frank Dernie

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Only at Stereophile, if you know how to read between the lines of John Atkinson's measurements, can you learn of the SQ weaknesses in these units.
Amen to that. HiFi News publish a much shorter measurements section, but they do test pickup cartridges, which Stereophile don't, or certainly haven't recently.
 

andreasmaaan

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Same can be said for the reviewers and fans of things like SET tube amps, etc. It is entirely their right to enjoy the sound of these components and even recommend their purchase. Problem enters when big name reveiwers and big name magazines portray these pieces as SOTA HiFi offering clearer windows to the source, veils lifted, and all that BS. Only at Stereophile, if you know how to read between the lines of John Atkinson's measurements, can you learn of the SQ weaknesses in these units.

One thing I've always respected about Stereophile is that, although its success is no doubt down to its reviews, it's remained serious about always also publishing reasonably informative measurements. The policy of not conducting these measurements until after the review has been signed off on is also interesting (and in theory worthy), although this does seem to run somewhat counter to their policy of even doing sighted reviews in the first place. If you're going to let the reviewer know everything about the device other than the measurements, why not also give them the measurements?

EDIT: is the idea to try to encourage the reviewer to keep their biases that arise from their knowledge of the manufacturer/device in check?
 
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Ron Texas

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It surely helps us readers know which reviewers' opinions are worthless.

I'm not sure who to believe anymore. Remember, Tyll Hertsens retired because he had significant hearing loss. Inner fidelity should probably pull all his work from the last few years. Steve Guttenberg needs a haircut. Herb Reichert's latest piece suggests there is a conspiracy among speaker manufacturers to produce low efficiency models by spending their money on fancy cabinets rather than drivers with powerful magnets. His piece Audio Without Numbes was just as loony. Darko thinks he can rank DAC's into a hierarchy of 8 categories. How about all the reviewers extolling the virtues of MQA? There are easily a few other ones out there I missed. At least I can believe the numbers around here.
 

Dialectic

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I'm not sure who to believe anymore. Remember, Tyll Hertsens retired because he had significant hearing loss. Inner fidelity should probably pull all his work from the last few years. Steve Guttenberg needs a haircut. Herb Reichert's latest piece suggests there is a conspiracy among speaker manufacturers to produce low efficiency models by spending their money on fancy cabinets rather than drivers with powerful magnets. His piece Audio Without Numbes was just as loony. Darko thinks he can rank DAC's into a hierarchy of 8 categories. How about all the reviewers extolling the virtues of MQA? There are easily a few other ones out there I missed. At least I can believe the numbers around here.

You know who loses their hearing when they get old? Fucking everybody. Audio magazines treat their younger contributors like shit--most notably the young woman who recently was fired by Stereophile despite being more qualified to work their than almost any of the other full-time staff.

There are of course no young people who work at Stereophile now. Tyll took an extraordinarily principled stand in stepping down, but I wouldn't discount his reviews from the last four years of his career any more than I would discount those of John Atkinson, Jim Austin, or this forum's own Dr. Rubinson--the three authors who recently have written reasonable and enlightening content in the magazine.

Here's my not very nice rundown of the others:
  • Herb Reichert's reviews should be ignored because, as many have noted, he does not seem capable of thinking clearly about sound reproduction or anything else. His preference for Schiit gear that measures horribly is telling. I refuse to call his dumpy apartment in a crappy part of Brooklyn the "Bunker."
  • Art Dudley seems like a nice, harmless, Mr. Rogers-like figure, but his preference for low-powered, expensive tube amps with either expensive or ancient high-efficiency speakers illustrate that he's not in the hobby for realism of sound reproduction.
  • Rafe Arnott is Michael Lavorgna 2.0, appearing to suffer from a dual case of commodity fetishism and narcissistic personality disorder. He loves writing about himself, his house, and his shit and not about the gear or the music. His reviews are badly written (just as Lavorgna's were) and leave out crucial information about the products. It is bewildering that Stereophile fired Michael Lavorgna--who of course should have been fired--to hire this guy.
  • Michael Fremer's effect on the hobby has been as harmful as, say, those of Mao on China and the Ayatollah Khomeini on Iran. I wish that the mainstream manufacturers of decently engineered stuff--Sony and JBL, for instance--had intervened earlier and threatened to pull ads from magazines that published his nonsense. He borrows money (or so he claims) to outfit his basement with badly engineered megabuck gear, so much megabuck gear that one could legitimately wonder whether one of the Collyer brothers will be discovered there, laying dead underneath a pile of $30,000 speaker cables. The best we can hope for is that he will face financial ruin. But because I'm working 80-hour weeks to finance his Medicare and Social Security checks, that probably won't happen.
 
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Sal1950

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Michael Fremer's effect on the hobby has been as harmful as, say, those of Mao on China or the Ayatollah Khomeini on Iran.
I couldn't agree more. So much so that Mikey publicly threatened me on CA to have The Entertainment Network's lawyers sue me for "besmirching his reputation" LOL
What I find the most disturbing is that in a magazine that supposedly offers interested parties a vision of the path to a SOTA sound reproduction system, instead they get something else. On a monthly basis the first 40-50 pages are filled with editorial pieces by Fremer, Dudley, and Reichert that continually pose the obsolete analog recording and LP reproduction gear as the very pinnacle of sound reproduction. To read this drivel monthly you'd think you'd have to spend six digits on a vinyl playback rig to reach audio nirvana.
BALONY is to put it mildly. I think it becomes very near a case of consumer fraud. :eek:
(No disrespect meant for our members that enjoy LP's)
 

Thomas savage

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You know who loses their hearing when they get old? Fucking everybody. Audio magazines treat their younger contributors like shit--most notably the young woman who recently was fired by Stereophile despite being more qualified to work their than almost any of the other full-time staff.

There are of course no young people who work at Stereophile now. Tyll took an extraordinarily principled stand in stepping down, but I wouldn't discount his reviews from the last four years of his career any more than I would discount those of John Atkinson, Jim Austin, or this forum's own Dr. Rubinson--the three authors who recently have written reasonable and enlightening content in the magazine.

Here's my not very nice rundown of the others:
  • Herb Reichert's reviews should be ignored because, as many have noted, he does not seem capable of thinking clearly about sound reproduction or anything else. His preference for Schiit gear that measures horribly is telling. I refuse to call his dumpy apartment in a crappy part of Brooklyn the "Bunker."
  • Art Dudley seems like a nice, harmless, Mr. Rogers-like figure, but his preference for low-powered, expensive tube amps with either expensive or ancient high-efficiency speakers illustrate that he's not in the hobby for realism of sound reproduction.
  • Rafe Arnott is Michael Lavorgna 2.0, appearing to suffer from a dual case of commodity fetishism and narcissistic personality disorder. He loves writing about himself, his house, and his shit and not about the gear or the music. His reviews are badly written (just as Lavorgna's were) and leave out crucial information about the products. It is bewildering that Stereophile fired Michael Lavorgna--who of course should have been fired--to hire this guy.
  • Michael Fremer's effect on the hobby has been as harmful as, say, those of Mao on China and the Ayatollah Khomeini on Iran. I wish that the mainstream manufacturers of decently engineered stuff--Sony and JBL, for instance--had intervened earlier and threatened to pull ads from magazines that published his nonsense. He borrows money (or so he claims) to outfit his basement with badly engineered megabuck gear, so much megabuck gear that one could legitimately wonder whether one of the Collyer brothers will be discovered there, laying dead underneath a pile of $30,000 speaker cables. The best we can hope for is that he will face financial ruin. But because I'm working 80-hour weeks to finance his Medicare and Social Security checks, that probably won't happen.
Don’t hold back mate, tell us how you really feel lol
 

andreasmaaan

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I'm not sure who to believe anymore. Remember, Tyll Hertsens retired because he had significant hearing loss. Inner fidelity should probably pull all his work from the last few years. Steve Guttenberg needs a haircut. Herb Reichert's latest piece suggests there is a conspiracy among speaker manufacturers to produce low efficiency models by spending their money on fancy cabinets rather than drivers with powerful magnets. His piece Audio Without Numbes was just as loony. Darko thinks he can rank DAC's into a hierarchy of 8 categories. How about all the reviewers extolling the virtues of MQA? There are easily a few other ones out there I missed. At least I can believe the numbers around here.

Hertsens says he took regular hearing tests and monitored his gradual hearing loss until it got to the point at which he determined he was no longer fit for work. The fact that this happened 4 years earlier than he'd originally intended, and that he acknowledges it publicly, indicates to me that his decision was probably timely and responsible.
 
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amirm

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I think Tyll just wanted to on the road with his RV. The loss of hearing thing is a justification after the fact. I am sure if he had not finished his RV, he would still be reviewing gear, hearing loss and all.
 
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