New Yggdrasil - First (and second) Impressions

Hi @devgcl 

Welcome to the forum.

To be honest, all sources that act as transport to the Yggy sound great coming out of the Yggy. I haven't A/B'd among them to compare which is "best" coming out of the Yggy.

I can tell you I primarily use the Oppo, but that is simply out of convenience. I transfer live music flac files to USB and play from the Oppo, intentionally avoiding the need to burn or acquire more CDs. I have 3500 already, so I don't need anymore. I use my cable box as "intermission music" for bio-breaks, that sort of thing. The computer when hooked in to the Yggy via USB sounds unbelievably good. So much better sounding than the USB DAC in my amp that I didn't even need to "critically listen" to compare and draw a conclusion.

From the perspective of initially A/B'ing so as to conclude/determine/verify that multibit Yggy is (far) superior to either of my delta-sigma's (to which there is no doubt in my mind), at the time I did use SE (RCA) from all devices in order to make the test that much more reliable, accurate, truthful, etc. I only have one set of XLR input on my amp anyway.

Should I choose to bypass the Yggy and go straight to the amp with my delta-sigma gear, the Oppo and ERC3 sound equally great on their own, and I can connect either via XLR or RCA.

I have since removed all connections from my amp with the exception of the Yggy's XLR out to my amps XLR in, to reduce cross talk among other RCA input channels. Sometimes I had two devices on, or in the case of the Yggy during initial testing, had both XLR and RCA to the amp. I've since removed the Yggy's RCA connection to my amp. 

The Yggy is unbelievably good. I'm at the next stage of its integration into my system and am trying to determine if there is truly a "benefit" (either sound quality or unit longevity/health) to leaving it on 24/7. Do you have thoughts on that? I've been reading that some users need to power down and reboot at times to "clear" certain issues.

I have owned the yggy for 2 years. I needed a Dac and it fit into the Roon/ microrendu architecture I wanted.  I listen to mostly acoustic jazz, bluegrass, folk, classical, and the great bands like Led Zeppelin. It does well with this type of music. Mike Moffat the designer of this Dac and the Theta Dac  prefers these genres.  

Bottom line play well recorded music without consideration if it’s 16bit, 24 bit,DSD or MQA. You will have your Aha moment. Yggy can only play 16 and 24 bit pcm streams.

Buy better speakers you will have another Aha moment  and you will not have to ask others if they hear it too if you are honest with yourself.  

If if you bought the Dac from Amazon would you have returned it with Amazon’s best in retail return process/policy?

Personally I would like to hear  Mytec’s Manhattan Dac it’s not limited to pcm. 

Thanks gdhal. My limited experience shows removing USB in the chain at times helps. Would be interested to see when you get the chance to A/B your Yggy into different input sources.

@devgcl

You're welcome. In a sense, all sources are removed other than the one I happen to be listening to at the time. This is because I have other devices physically powered off, albeit they are connected to the Ygyy. I don't expect that I'll set out to A/B which input source sounds better. Among other reasons, because all of my source transports are different, it wouldn't be an accurate A/B in any case. I believe Mike Moffet has stated that from the Yggdrasil's perspective where sound quality is concerned, AES/EBU is the "best". They are all great, that I can tell you. :)

My philosophy is if there is not at least a tiny bit of sound improvement ( whatever you consider an improvement) when you first use, breaking in is not going to make things better for you.  I guess you can learn to like somehing over time and pretend you love the purchase. If you cant hear a difference with the oppo, then I would return. If anything, save $1200 and buy the Oppo Sonica dac if you want a dedicated one. You can spend money on new cables with the oppo as well as the Schiit.