This is a review and detailed measurements of Schiit WYRD "USB decrapifier." It is on kind loan from a member and retails for USD $99 plus shipping from Schiit direct.
This is a box that has USB input and output and external transformer input. It generates new USB power using the latter, and reclocks USB using a USB hub chip with the claim of it being more accurate. Externally it looks like the rest of the budget products from Schiit except that it has yet another finish than others:
These solutions make "perfect" intuitive sense: USB is a computer port so by definition must have dirty power and signal. So why not clean them and generate better sound? Schiit doesn't provide any measurements to show efficacy of the product so that job falls on our shoulders.
For this testing I thought I should measure the performance of Schiit Modi 3 DAC per picture above. To cover our bases, I also tested with another DAC under review (March Audio dac1).
As I always do, I test what happens to the output of the DAC, not what the device does or does not to USB signal. We don't listen to USB bus. We listen to what comes out of the DAC. Any improvement better show up in the output of the DAC or it doesn't exist as far as I am concerned.
Let's see what measurements show.
Measurements
For testing very small differences especially as it relates to data interconnects, I use jitter measurements. This is done with a very deep "FFT" of 256,000 points. In English, this processing substantially lowers the measured noise of the DAC, allowing us to see the smallest distortion and spurious responses. Per above, I tested the Schiit Modi 3 alone and with Wyrd. I left out the Schiit power supply as it works fine with USB power alone (I also tested with its external power supply and results are the same):
View attachment 18939
Everything other than the tall spike at 12 kHz is unwanted and not part of the original signal.
As you see, measuring down to better than -120 dB, we see the jitter spurious tones are there without Schiit Wyrd. In other words, the internal mechanisms for distortion and noise are far, far more of a factor than any improvement Schiit Wyrd wants to impart (assuming it has something to offer).
What is that? This is a single tone and not "music?" OK, let's run a composite 32-tone multitone through the Modi 3 with and without Wyrd and see the difference:
View attachment 18940
At first glance it seems that the Wyrd (in red) actually made things worse. But that is just run to run variations. The Schiit Modi 3 USB implementation is not very good in that regard but what ails it is not fixed by Wyrd.
Let's run the same test with another DAC, the March Audio dac1 (review to come soon):
View attachment 18941
Now the results fall right on top of each other because of stable performance of dac1. Wyrd of course does nothing for this good implementation.
As an aside, see how the noise floor is lower on dac1 in lower frequencies (bottom of the tones) than Schiit Modi 3.
We could test more DACs until we get bored out of our mind but for now, I say we have convincing results that with any half-decent DAC, including Schiit's own, the Wyrd does nothing.
Conclusions
As many of us suspect, products like Schiit do nothing to improve the output of DACs. Reasons are obvious from engineering point of view: no DAC uses USB power as is. The power goes through a conversion to another voltage and filtering. This filtering may be as good as 100X better than what comes in. Making the source power cleaner makes little difference here. More so, that power is not what comes out of your DAC but goes through other circuits which themselves have immunity to power differences. So no wonder cleaning up the power has yet to show any improvement in countless tests I have run.
Reclocking the USB bus is even more futile. These are all asynchronous DACs. The dac chip runs from an internally generated clock source, not derived from USB. USB bus only needs to be clean enough for reliable data transmission. If you are getting no static or drop outs, then you are golden: the usb clock has done its job.
How about the many people who swear these products make an audible difference? Simple: they use lay intuition that the device is actually improving the output of the DAC, listen more carefully and all of a sudden notice detail that was always there but was not noticed. As we have shown here, the waveform coming out of the DAC is NOT improved in any way. Therefore any improvement perceived, is one manufactured by the brain, not heard by the ear.
Needless to say,
I can NOT recommend the Schiit Wyrd. It does nothing that your DAC needs and is yet another contraption taking space on your desk.
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