Measurement and Review of Schiit BiFrost Multibit DAC

[tili]

thank you for the perfect summary above, couldn’t have said it better.

 

[svart-hvitt]

I think it's the result of a technology that has reached perfection. Digital audio is perfect in performance terms (check out the measurements of competent DACs compared to any rival technology: vinyl, r-to-r, etc.). And it is also perfect in terms of cost, size, weight, energy consumption, maintenance requirements, etc.

It has reached the point where the best performance possible is almost free in terms of cost. So where else has it to go?

1. Disillusionment when perfect audio played over an amp and passive speakers sounds just like recorded music. Shouldn't it be, like, orgasmic?
2. Expectation bias where perceived sound resembles the technology: low cost, light weight, made of plastic
3. 'Audiophile grade' housings to add weight and cost and thereby improve the perceived sound. Ten thousand dollars-worth, say.
4. Superstition and rumours about bad sound that doesn't show up in measurements
5. Alternative 'retro' technology that can be investigated at the competence level of garage-based companies: changes to the filter; use of 'classic' DAC chips.
6. The 'audiophile-grade' company that sells its stuff for $500 - much cheaper than $10,000 so brilliant value!

Maybe off-topic, so you’re warned...

Next step will be amplifiers. Even Benchmark claim that tuning of a specific amp technology is a must when playing back hi-res content.

Many on this forum claim class D is deficient technology.

Are amps really still in its infancy?

 

[Thomas savage]

Maybe off-topic, so you’re warned...

Next step will be amplifiers. Even Benchmark claim that tuning of a specific amp technology is a must when playing back hi-res content.

Many on this forum claim class D is deficient technology.

Are amps really still in its infancy?

Good question, if folks want to mull it over create a new thread.

 

[Candlesticks]

There is no evidence that Schiit has fixed any issues with the Bifrost MB. Even if they had it would reflect poorly on Schiit for their products to be sold in significant numbers with no recall of something that needs fixing. I certainly wouldn't be buying anything of theirs under the belief it was engineered well at this point until proven to be true.

 

[GearMe]

@amirm

New here..saw your post on Head-Fi. Own a variety of gear including several dacs from 'lowly' Fiio's to Sony to iFi Audio to lower-end / mid-level Schiit (yes...even a Bifrost multibit...aka Bimby).

So...I bought the Bimby because it was the complimentary dac (i.e looked nice as a stack) to go with my Valhalla 2 OTL amp for my Senns & Beyers. Thought about getting the DS version to save a few bucks but decided to see what the fuss was about MB dacs. It sounds fine to my ears and is upgradeable...no buyer's remorse here. That said, I also like my ifi Audio dac/amp system for it's chosen use case at roughly half the price.

Am a big believer in open, civilized discussion on claims/counterclaims, etc. and assume other folks have a similar belief until they prove otherwise. With that in mind, I thought that your post on Jason Stoddard's Head-Fi thread and Jason's suggestion to engage directly with Mike Moffat on his thread would open up an interesting dialogue between you and MikeM. However, that hasn't transpired...hopefully it still will.

Given that, a question that seems unresolved (unless I missed it) is that Schiit claims the glitch was fixed (even though it was inaudible to their ears)...see Jason's Head-Fi excerpt below (dated Oct 18 2017).

• So...my first question would be is the Bimby measured a current one (i.e. post-April 2016 if I counted back correctly)?
• If yes, then is this an audible difference?
• If yes to both of the above, then doesn't it make sense to engage with Mike in his thread?

Thanks in advance for your reply!

Jason's Excerpt:
Case the second: the glitch fix. Okay. Here’s the thing that started this whole chapter. Mike’s already written about this on his blog, but here’s the summary: a couple of years ago, someone got their nose out of joint about a “glitch” the Yggdrasil exhibited around zero-crossing. We’re talking stuff that’s 120dB down. This is despite AtomicBob measuring the Yggy (showing the glitch) and being unperturbed. But this dood was super-emphatic about being able to “hear the glitch.” He went on and on and on and on about it.

Aside: and this is how internet memes get started—one guy gets a bit, ah, obsessed, and spreads his views far and wide, far and wide, and spends all his time online defending them, because, you know, that’s what matters, not family or fun or friends or actually engaging in a productive debate where you learn something, and then someone who searches for the product gets Google barfing up all his words on the screen, because he wrote far and wide on the subject, he must be an expert. Shoot me now.

Mike and Dave and I kinda looked at each other and shrugged when we learned about it, because we all knew about “the glitch” and had discussed it during development, eventually deciding just to leave it alone, because it didn’t have any audible consequences.

But this guy kept going. And going. And going and going and going (Note to other sites: this is what moderation is for.)

Finally, Dave says, “Well, we can fix the glitch. It’s just a ROM change.”

Mike, who by now is weary of reading about his “incompetence,” says, “Yeah, **** it, go ahead, let’s compare the two ROMs again and see if there’s any difference.”

So he did. And we compared. There was no sonic difference, just as there hadn’t been any difference during development. No big shock.

“So what do we do now?” Dave asked.

“**** it, put in the glitch fix in all current production.”

“For Yggy?”

“For everything—Yggy, Gumby, Bimby,” Mike said, waving a hand.

“And tell people about it, for an upgrade?” I asked, a little nervously. It was a bit early in the production cycle to change Yggy, and Gumby was really, really new, and Bifrost Multibit had just started shipping.

Mike paused, then grinned. “No. Let someone measure it, like, a year from now, and find out it has no glitch.”

“So never tell them?”

Mike shrugged. “Tell them in a year. Or two.”

I nodded. It really didn’t matter. It didn’t sound any different, so why call attention to it? It would be like admitting the glitch was bad, if we responded to this one crazy guy.

So we applied the deglitchified ROMs and shut up.

That is, until some crazy rumors about upgrades to our multibit DACs started circulating early this month. That’s when Mike had to step in and say, “Yeah, it’s a terrible conspiracy, we made a change 18 months ago that makes your DACs measure better, but not sound any better in any way.”

 

[Jinjuku]

Am a big believer in open, civilized discussion on claims/counterclaims, etc. and assume other folks have a similar belief until they prove otherwise. With that in mind, I thought that your post on Jason Stoddard's Head-Fi thread and Jason's suggestion to engage directly with Mike Moffat on his thread would open up an interesting dialogue between you and MikeM. However, that hasn't transpired...hopefully it still will.

You may have missed the point: Amir was banned after his 1st post. You may be a big believer in open, civilized discussion. Apparently others are frikking terrified of it.

 

[Jinjuku]

Okay. Here’s the thing that started this whole chapter. Mike’s already written about this on his blog, but here’s the summary: a couple of years ago, someone got their nose out of joint about a “glitch” the Yggdrasil exhibited around zero-crossing. We’re talking stuff that’s 120dB down. This is despite AtomicBob measuring the Yggy (showing the glitch) and being unperturbed. But this dood was super-emphatic about being able to “hear the glitch.” He went on and on and on and on about it.

Because according to subjectivists "EVERYTHING MATTERS!"

 

[Jinjuku]

Why would I get the Schiit Bitfrost MB with it's channel imbalance, it's non-linearity, it's distortion profile, it's lack of jitter suppression vs another DAC that exhibits none of this?

 

[Candlesticks]

@amirm

New here..saw your post on Head-Fi. Own a variety of gear including several dacs from 'lowly' Fiio's to Sony to iFi Audio to lower-end / mid-level Schiit (yes...even a Bifrost multibit...aka Bimby).

So...I bought the Bimby because it was the complimentary dac (i.e looked nice as a stack) to go with my Valhalla 2 OTL amp for my Senns & Beyers. Thought about getting the DS version to save a few bucks but decided to see what the fuss was about MB dacs. It sounds fine to my ears and is upgradeable...no buyer's remorse here. That said, I also like my ifi Audio dac/amp system for it's chosen use case at roughly half the price.

Am a big believer in open, civilized discussion on claims/counterclaims, etc. and assume other folks have a similar belief until they prove otherwise. With that in mind, I thought that your post on Jason Stoddard's Head-Fi thread and Jason's suggestion to engage directly with Mike Moffat on his thread would open up an interesting dialogue between you and MikeM. However, that hasn't transpired...hopefully it still will.

Given that, a question that seems unresolved (unless I missed it) is that Schiit claims the glitch was fixed (even though it was inaudible to their ears)...see Jason's Head-Fi excerpt below (dated Oct 18 2017).

• So...my first question would be is the Bimby measured a current one (i.e. post-April 2016 if I counted back correctly)?
• If yes, then is this an audible difference?
• If yes to both of the above, then doesn't it make sense to engage with Mike in his thread?

Thanks in advance for your reply!

Jason's Excerpt:
Case the second: the glitch fix. Okay. Here’s the thing that started this whole chapter. Mike’s already written about this on his blog, but here’s the summary: a couple of years ago, someone got their nose out of joint about a “glitch” the Yggdrasil exhibited around zero-crossing. We’re talking stuff that’s 120dB down. This is despite AtomicBob measuring the Yggy (showing the glitch) and being unperturbed. But this dood was super-emphatic about being able to “hear the glitch.” He went on and on and on and on about it.

Aside: and this is how internet memes get started—one guy gets a bit, ah, obsessed, and spreads his views far and wide, far and wide, and spends all his time online defending them, because, you know, that’s what matters, not family or fun or friends or actually engaging in a productive debate where you learn something, and then someone who searches for the product gets Google barfing up all his words on the screen, because he wrote far and wide on the subject, he must be an expert. Shoot me now.

Mike and Dave and I kinda looked at each other and shrugged when we learned about it, because we all knew about “the glitch” and had discussed it during development, eventually deciding just to leave it alone, because it didn’t have any audible consequences.

But this guy kept going. And going. And going and going and going (Note to other sites: this is what moderation is for.)

Finally, Dave says, “Well, we can fix the glitch. It’s just a ROM change.”

Mike, who by now is weary of reading about his “incompetence,” says, “Yeah, **** it, go ahead, let’s compare the two ROMs again and see if there’s any difference.”

So he did. And we compared. There was no sonic difference, just as there hadn’t been any difference during development. No big shock.

“So what do we do now?” Dave asked.

“**** it, put in the glitch fix in all current production.”

“For Yggy?”

“For everything—Yggy, Gumby, Bimby,” Mike said, waving a hand.

“And tell people about it, for an upgrade?” I asked, a little nervously. It was a bit early in the production cycle to change Yggy, and Gumby was really, really new, and Bifrost Multibit had just started shipping.

Mike paused, then grinned. “No. Let someone measure it, like, a year from now, and find out it has no glitch.”

“So never tell them?”

Mike shrugged. “Tell them in a year. Or two.”

I nodded. It really didn’t matter. It didn’t sound any different, so why call attention to it? It would be like admitting the glitch was bad, if we responded to this one crazy guy.

So we applied the deglitchified ROMs and shut up.

That is, until some crazy rumors about upgrades to our multibit DACs started circulating early this month. That’s when Mike had to step in and say, “Yeah, it’s a terrible conspiracy, we made a change 18 months ago that makes your DACs measure better, but not sound any better in any way.”

I read that as spin from Jason. It doesn't matter either way.

Why would I get the Schiit Bitfrost MB with it's channel imbalance, it's non-linearity, it's distortion profile, it's lack of jitter suppression vs another DAC that exhibits none of this?

If you buy based on measurements you wouldn't buy it and wouldn't recommend others to. But to some all they care about is how they believe it sounds. You aren't going to change their minds and they've been primed by the marketing already.

 

[mindbomb]

The audibility of individual problems might have been interesting to discuss if this dac was exceptionally good in other ways. But this dac is poor across many metrics and doesn't seem to have any potentially redeeming qualities. I think we really have to reckon with the fact that schiit was knowingly selling poor performing dacs because they were confident in their ability to market multibit technology.

 

[Blumlein 88]

This whole issue is a good spotlight on subjective audio. I know the person they described as making a big deal out of the glitch. He sent me samples of his reference DAC and the yiggy done with a very very high quality ADC. His complaint is the yiggy is etched harsh and unmusical. His reference dac and filtering start a good roll off at 8khz. No wonder the yiggy sounded harsh to him. Had nothing to do with an audible glitch.

He even knew this but maintained he had chosen his filtering by ear for most musical and transparent. So the comparison in his mind was valid. The glitch was audible. Which is of course ridiculous.

He of course was an experienced listener with hands on experience of many expensive DAcs. He could account for the response difference and clearly hear the glitch that made him unhappy with the yiggy. Or so he maintained. Truly bizarre.

 

[amirm]

The audibility of individual problems might have been interesting to discuss if this dac was exceptionally good in other ways. But this dac is poor across many metrics and doesn't seem to have any potentially redeeming qualities. I think we really have to reckon with the fact that schiit was knowingly selling poor performing dacs because they were confident in their ability to market multibit technology.

Shoot. I woke up wanting to make this point and you stole my words!

Key thing here is that unlike a tube amp where we can hang our hat on euphonic aspects of its distortions, there is nothing good about a DAC that glitches, or lacks such high level of linearity. By this token, even 16 bit audio is way too good for it!

 

[Jinjuku]

I read that as spin from Jason. It doesn't matter either way.



If you buy based on measurements you wouldn't buy it and wouldn't recommend others to. But to some all they care about is how they believe it sounds. You aren't going to change their minds and they've been primed by the marketing already.

b'b'b'but "Everything Matters" it's "System Synergy".

 

[amirm]

@amirm

New here..saw your post on Head-Fi. Own a variety of gear including several dacs from 'lowly' Fiio's to Sony to iFi Audio to lower-end / mid-level Schiit (yes...even a Bifrost multibit...aka Bimby).

So...I bought the Bimby because it was the complimentary dac (i.e looked nice as a stack) to go with my Valhalla 2 OTL amp for my Senns & Beyers. Thought about getting the DS version to save a few bucks but decided to see what the fuss was about MB dacs. It sounds fine to my ears and is upgradeable...no buyer's remorse here. That said, I also like my ifi Audio dac/amp system for it's chosen use case at roughly half the price.

Am a big believer in open, civilized discussion on claims/counterclaims, etc. and assume other folks have a similar belief until they prove otherwise. With that in mind, I thought that your post on Jason Stoddard's Head-Fi thread and Jason's suggestion to engage directly with Mike Moffat on his thread would open up an interesting dialogue between you and MikeM. However, that hasn't transpired...hopefully it still will.

First, a warm welcome to the forum.

I of course saw that remark from Jason. I don't intend to do that. My job here is to provide measurement data where none existed before. This should empower audiophiles to make more informed decisions. And have a more concrete dialog with the manufacturer should they want to. I am on no crusade against Schiit or its founder. Spending time arguing back and forth with them on another forum where they have extreme power over membership rights is not a fair way to do things even if I was so motivated to have such discussions.

The data is published here. If they have an answer, they should come and address it here. To the extent they seem to not care, well that is that and people should take that into account. Certainly I found Jason's answer to be flippant and exactly the same as what he did when my prior reviews such as the Schiit Modi 2 came out. They seem to have an expectation that it is my job or responsibility to go and chase them. It is not. Their customers should demand that they do. Not help them paper over data as some of their users seem to be doing.

Even if they don't want to come here, they should provide their own measurements showing how their latest boxes perform.

Mike, who by now is weary of reading about his “incompetence,” says, “Yeah, **** it, go ahead, let’s compare the two ROMs again and see if there’s any difference.”

So he did. And we compared. There was no sonic difference, just as there hadn’t been any difference during development. No big shock.

I love to see them compare their DAC against another blind and see if they can tell that difference. I am sure they would fail that just the same -- multibit or not!

It is strange that they sell DACs on the very concept of every one sounding different yet all of a sudden they could not hear changes to the distortion characteristics of the DAC? If that is inaudible, how about the rest of the differences? Mind you, they may be right. I am just questioning their religion and way of testing things.

 

[Sal1950]

It is strange that they sell DACs on the very concept of every one sounding different yet all of a sudden they could not hear changes to the distortion characteristics of the DAC? If that is inaudible, how about the rest of the differences?

Ah you know buddy, that's some special magical parameter we don't know how to measure yet.
It all depends on which magic dust has been sprinkled on the device. Some magic dust is pricier than others you understand.

 

[Frank Dernie]

Ah you know buddy, that's some special magical parameter we don't know how to measure yet.
It all depends on which magic dust has been sprinkled on the device. Some magic dust is pricier than others you understand.

Ah! the magical parameter we haven't learned to measure yet...

 

[Blumlein 88]

You guys talking about plankton again? Unmeasurable micro ultra detailing.

 

[svart-hvitt]

In a bigger context, isn’t this story a bit symptomatic of contemporary American engineering? I.e. more marketing, less user value in a «rational» sense». This is the American way, isn’t it? Value is in the eye of the beholder.

 

[DonH56]

In a bigger context, isn’t this story a bit symptomatic of contemporary American marketing? I.e. more marketing, less user value in a «rational» sense». This is the American way, isn’t it? Value is in the eye of the beholder.

Fixed it for you... Don't blame the rest of us when some stray to the Dark Side.

 

[RayDunzl]

This is the American way, isn’t it?

"I'm a moron and this is my wife
She's frosting a cake with a paper knife
All what we got here's American made
It's a little bit cheesy but it's nicely displayed
Well, we don't get excited when it crumbles and breaks
We just get on the phone and call up some flakes
They rush on over and wreck it some more
And we are so dumb, they're linin' up at our door"

F. Zappa - Flakes (1979)