Subjective Impressions of Schiit Yggdrasil

[seduce_me]

I recently bought a Yggy and have been listening to it for the last couple of months and I feel it’s time to give my personal opinion. I had a Matrix Mini-i purchased off Massdrop and now my current chain is:

 

PC > Foobar > ASIO > Lynx AES16 > AES3 > Yggy > Little Dot Mk 3 > HD650 KISS modded > HD800 + SDR

 

Take this review with a grain of salt since my amp is not resolving enough to reveal every nuance or detail the Yggy improves over my previous setup.
This DAC is very expensive at $2299 new, and you can find used ones for around $1700 (if you can find one in the first place). The topology is different to other conventional delta-sigma DACs and it sonically impressed me enough to buy one after I auditioned it.

 

Overview:
The Yggy is a very interesting DAC, and does not use your standard sabre or AKM chip for D/A conversion. Instead it uses 2 AD5791 chips per channel that are true 20-bit chips. You might be thinking, but 20-bit is lower than 32-bit? Isn’t this less than ideal for such an expensive DAC? The 32-bit chips you see in other common DACs actually have an ENOB of 19.5 and do not actually go near 24, or 32 for that matter. The chips are used in high-precision applications like MRI machines and they are mil-spec.

It is also completely modular from the input board to the DAC section. Mine comes with a USB Gen 3 board, but the new Gen 5 upgrade board can be installed if I want to. This ensures that the Yggy will not be obsolete, but constantly upgraded to keep up if it needs to. heh

The Yggy has Schiit’s proprietary multibit implementation. It claims to preserve all original samples while also being time domain optimized. This is the biggest difference between Yggy and any other DAC. It has both the benefits of NOS and OS DACs. (NOS DACs preserve the samples and OS DACs make the noise easier to filter out.)

Sound:
I'm not the best with words so I'll try to give examples and analogies to compensate. Comparing the Yggy to my previous DAC, I found the Yggy to improve the sound quite significantly. It is not a night-and-day difference, but subjectively I enjoyed my music way more. With that said, I still consider the Matrix to be a good value for $300. It is tonally inoffensive and is great for transportable use.

 

• The bass is more textured and defined. In Daft Punk’s RAM, it is quite noticeable when A/B’ing between the 2 DACs. The slam and attack of the Yggy is better than the Matrix, on some parts it felt congested and compressed on the Matrix. It hards quite a bit harder and has more focus especially in the subbass. 
• Separation and soundstage is better than the Matrix. Individual sounds in complex musical passages are easier to distinguish. The soundstage is also more natural than the Matrix. The Matrix sounds more ‘in your head’ but the Yggy encircles your head. With the HD650, these differences are stark, even though it should prove difficult for a headphone like such with a small soundstage.
• IMO, the most noticeable improvement of the Yggy is its rendering of spatial images. The Yggy makes the sounds sound more real and natural. For example, a hi-hat sounds like "ssssssschh"  on the Matrix but on the Yggy the attack and tail end is more defined, like so: "Tsssssschhh". 
• There is no digital fatigue after having heard brighter DACs like ODAC and Sabre-based DACs. Cymbal crashes don't hurt my ears with the Yggy.
• It is brutally honest with your recordings, and will reveal any recording noise deep in your recording. However, it is not tonally lean or overly clinical.  
• Something that may not be an improvement is that it tends to emphasize tape hiss. Dark Side Of The Moon is a clear example.

In conclusion, my Matrix doesn’t sound as natural as the Yggy. It presents the sound in a way that is both stimulating and relaxing and does not seem to have the fatigue that other DACs seem to bring, especially sabre-based DACs that I have auditioned. An analogy would be turning up the sharpness knob in a photo editing program. Turning the knob too much will result in an artificial image that lacks realism. Yggy seems to strike a good balance, sounding sharp with loads of detail but still very realistic.

 

On warm-up, it sounds better, but out of the box it is already impressive. This is not some voodoo “burn-in”, the components in the Yggy do get better performance once they get up to the operating temperature, with measurable benefits in jitter performance.

http://superbestaudiofriends.org/index.php?threads/schiit-yggdrasil-measurements.413/

Overall, the Yggy is a really good DAC that offers excellent value relative to other DACs at similar price points. (Chord Hugo, Bricasti M1 etc.) Regardless, it is still very expensive and others may consider me insane for ever considering this acquisition in the first place. Heck, the Modi 2 can essentially do the same thing for 23x less of the cost. However, if you want an excellent DAC that does things that no other DAC can, give this a shot.

 

 

 

 

 

Albums used when A/B’ing:

AC/DC – Back In Black

Eagles - Hell Freezes Over
Eric Clapton - Unplugged

Fleetwood Mac – Rumours
Daft Punk – Random Access Memories
Dire Straits – Brothers In Arms
Dire Straits – Love Over Gold
Miles Davis – Filles de Killimanjaro
Norah Jones – Come Away With Me
Pink Floyd – Meddle

Pink Floyd – Dark Side Of The Moon
Radiohead – Kid A

[elira]

I think most of the improvements come from the multibit DAC. A modi multibit should share most of the sonic qualities, not as good as a Yggy but worth a try for more constrained budgets. 

 

Nice review and thanks for sharing.

[spwath]

22 minutes ago, elira said:

I think most of the improvements come from the multibit DAC. A modi multibit should share most of the sonic qualities, not as good as a Yggy but worth a try for more constrained budgets. 

 

Nice review and thanks for sharing.

i found the Modi multibit unimpressive 

[Dackzy]

10 minutes ago, spwath said:

i found the Modi multibit unimpressive 

I found it outright bad....

[spwath]

6 hours ago, Dackzy said:

I found it outright bad....

I had it on demo for a week, I honestly couldent tell it apart from my Geek Out 450 line out, using Valhalla 2 and HD650.

[seduce_me]

I'd reckon the biggest difference is from the filter. The gumby has the same filter but the different DAC chips probably contribute to the minor audible difference. 

[Dackzy]

6 hours ago, spwath said:

I had it on demo for a week, I honestly couldent tell it apart from my Geek Out 450 line out, using Valhalla 2 and HD650.

to my ears it sounded way off, it didn't sound like a multibit.

 

2 hours ago, seduce_me said:

I'd reckon the biggest difference is from the filter. The gumby has the same filter but the different DAC chips probably contribute to the minor audible difference. 

the biggest difference to my ears when testing Gumby and yggy was that the Gumby was warmer sounding and then I started to notice the smaller details not being as good and so on.