Schiit Reference Sytem review: Freya into Yggdrasil, into Vidar

I am all for the latest round of Giant-killer DACs. I think it is wonderful that the kind of performance that only Meitner and a few select offered over 15 years ago is now quite widely available in $2000 range. Technological progress and competition is wonderful.

That said, I take JA of stereophile's comments as a serious concern with regard to the Yggdrasil. You can find other DACs in this price range that Stereophile has given a much cleaner "medical health checkup"!

Quote Stereophile:
"It's difficult to sum up the Schiit Yggdrasil's measured behavior. While the processor's analog circuitry is superbly well designed, its digital circuitry appears to have problems with high-level, high-frequency tones, and with the LSBs of 24-bit data. It's possible, of course, that the former will be rare with music, and that the latter will be obscured by the noise floors of recordings. But it does look as if the digital circuitry is not fully optimized. Hopefully, this could be addressed with a firmware upgrade.—John Atkinson
Read more at https://www.stereophile.com/content/schiit-audio-yggdrasil-da-processor-measurements#lvfQgKsUQg5tp3S...

@ghosthouse

The 20 bit thing is not on the whole a big deal. I think Stereophile was wrong to say that.

However to truncate or simply round the 24 bit incoming data shows total ignorance of 20 years of best industry practices for reducing bit depth. A designer who doesn’t have a clue about audio industry digital signal processing should not be designing audio digital converters, IMHO.

@gdhal

It is good marketing I have to admit. Claim that your competitors are all "guessing" and yours is the world’s only DAC that doesn’t "guess". It would be nice if it were true. No well known DAC competitor is actually guessing. Honestly I have absolutely no problem with this marketing claim as it is so similar to other marketing hyperbole typical of the audio trade.

Also as posted above, I agree that JA was out of line to call the Yggdrasil obsolete. The fair critique is when JA refers to mistakes in the digital design foremost by truncating (or rounding if you prefer which amounts to the same thing). This is clearly a design mistake even if it wont affect things much - possibly spurious tones at the 21 bit level which is still low.

Although in the real audio world 20 bits is very nearly as good as 24 bits, the world of high end is measured by diminishingly small additional performance. A Ford Focus RS is a very good car and performs as well as one could ever need on a legal road but that doesnt make it as good as a Porsche GT3 does it? But Stereophile were out of line just as if a car reviewer were to say the Ford Focus RT is obsolete - it is definitely wrong!