Got my Modius in a couple weeks back. First of all I had heard about Schitt's Schitty quality control and I can indeed confirm this-- the microUSB jacks for power were not correctly aligned with their holes in the chassis. Funny enough I have had more QC issues with USA built gear from companies like Schitt and JDSlabs than any chinese manufacturers, for what its forth. I inserted my cable at an angle and managed to carefully bend it up a bit but it is still slightly crooked inserted, I hope this will not cause problems but it seems OK for now. To be fair to them they did agree to a replacement, but refused to ship one out advance, so I will likely not take them up on it considering the unpredictable shipping issues these days, and the fact that the first one they supposedly shipped never even arrived so I ended up having to wait longer for them to reship. They need to square away their QC and customer service, any clear issues such as this need immediate remediation with minimal downtime for the customer. Get your Schitt together, Schiit! This experience definitely left a bad taste for this company with me but the performance of the DAC mitigated it somewhat.
As for the sound...I am pretty satisfied. Current set up is Modius USB (with power by 5V/3.5A microusb)>Gotham/Amphenol XLR 2ft (World Best Cables)>TEAC AX-505 (custom hypex ncore nc122mp)>Philharmonic BMR. It sounds really friggin good. Coming from previous dac, JDSLabs OL DAC (AK4490) I was surprised at the improvement, I was not expecting as much. At this point I don't think I can do anything to significantly improve my system aside from improving room treatment and speaker placement, all my stuff is state of the art, and total cost was under 3500$ for all this gear not counting the pile of older dacs and chi-fi TPA and tripath amps accumulated over the past decade or so. This DAC + Ncore or purifi and decent speakers is endgame stuff.
Compared to JDSlabs OLDAC a bit more detail, much bigger soundstage, I can hear quieter stuff more and louder stuff doesn't overpower it. Took a couple days for my ears to burn in but I do enjoy it much more. Weirdly enough do end up setting volume slightly higher on my amp than I did before (when I was using RCA inputs). I attribute this either to the slightly low-ish XLR voltage on the modius of just under 4V or the fact the XLR inputs on my TEAC amp set it to a lower gain setting (which is just fine with me). That being said I was already typically at like -30db on the amp so this is no issue. I haven't tried the cell phone charger that comes with it, which is decent (~2.1A), but I elected to use a 3.5A dedicated microUSB wallwart I had used before for powering RaspberryPi and it is working great.
Thrown everything from deep dubstep to high fidelity psych rock (Ozric Tentacles lossless) to steely dan at this thing and it definitely opened up a layer I wasnt hearing before. Bass is solid and clean, smooth highs and vocals, crisp percussives. Playing movies I can now hear the foley sounds very clearly such as footsteps, door opening, sounds more realistic. More than before, voices sound like they are in the room with me now, and I find myself looking over my shoulder sometimes.
I was originally going to go with the D90 but it was loaded with junk I dont need, plus its made in china. I have to also thank monoprice for making me wait months for their vaporware AK4499 cavali dac which has been delayed so many times, it led me to finding this dac which IMO was just what I was looking for, and at a much nicer price. And big thanks to this forum for bringing this dac to my attention, due to this companys heavy investment in marketing I would not have even considered dealing with them until seeing the green light from the engineers and tech-heads on this place.
enjoy the DAC!!
