Schiit Bifrost vs. the original Peachtree Dac-it

Going off the Stereophile measurements, it’s a pretty good DAC except for the IMD, but in today’s market it would compete with the cream of the crop ~$175 DACs. The Topping D50 or SMSL SU-8 are both better than your current DAC by a good margin, but I do doubt you’d hear any or much of a difference. Not a perfect analogy, but it’d be like upgrading from a car with a 7 second 0-to-60mph time to one that’s 6.95 seconds.

IMO, the only DAC that Schiit makes that’s worth it’s salt is their new Modi 3. The Bifrost isn’t bad, but not even close in performance to the cheaper DACs mentioned above.

@coachpoconnor 
 
Even Schiit’s flagship DAC won’t be as accurate as the two I mentioned above that are much cheaper. Like I said, only their Modi 3 is worth buying. 

@n80

I’m a person who wants accurate playback, I only want to hear the song as intended, so I also am very much so pro solid state over tubes, no matter how cool tubes look. The Yggy offers nothing in terms of performance for accurate playback over much cheaper DAC’s, it’s basically 16Bit (no longer linear past that, at 20Bit it’s a level is off by 60dB), when even $100 DACs can be linear to at least 18Bit usually (the $100 Khadas DAC board a linear within +/-0.2dB at 20Bit), the Yggy also has around 40dB worse THD+N than a Topping DX7 in the bass, which is almost 1/5 the price plus it has a headphone amp.

Like I said, it won’t sound bad, it just doesn’t perform as accurately as even DACs 1/10 the price. And yes, if you look at the Stereophile measurements for almost all high end DACs, they all aim for accuracy.

@kahlenz

Yeah, that’s why I tried to stress that I’m talking about accurate playback. I want all my gear transparent, and add DSP to taste, rather than not add any DSP and try and mix and match gear that colors the sound on its own. Simply different philosophies.

and even if we did how do you map the test results to a subjective listening experience?

Thats super easy, if any distortion/non-linearity/errors/etc. are below established audibility tresholds, then it’ll be transparent. THD+N of -130dB vs -140dB is not meaningful for usage as they are both below the noise floor of any room, even though it’s easy to say the latter is better. A DAC that has a frequency response of +/-0.1dB is better than +/-0.2dB, but they’ll sound similar and be audibly better than one that’s +/-1dB. IMD that’s 60dB below the fundamental will be inaudible with music (may be audible for test tones).

Indeed, getting concrete values for what’s transparent is difficult, but if the values are far better than any human tests have shown, than that’s good.

@2psyop

Anyone who thinks a power cable makes any difference is sadly mistaken, any product that has a non-optimal power cord is few and far between and should be considered defective. The only caveat is if you live next to like a radio tower, where you have crazy EMI, which Paul McGowan (who sells >$100 power cords) even admits; but even then, a 20¢ ferrite chocked will fix that. 
 
It’s no different than buying those Brilliant Pebbles that you scatter across your room to reduce reflections.

@n80

It does take power over USB. But yes, odd they didn’t include a wall power cable. I know some owners use an Anker portable battery to power their’s (hey, it’s not as crazy as people using a Chord Mojo as a desktop DAC).

@n80 
 
ASR measurements show no difference in performance using USB power nor the Anker. The D50 uses a standard 1amp 5v, so something like this will work. Again, won’t defend the decision to not include one.