Mike's thoughts:
On “designer”
DACs and why I do not build them:
I have been on record saying that the Yggy is the best DAC I know how to build. By and large, that statement stands given my current design worldview. Note that I did not say design philosophy. The philosophy concept implies that I am building a DAC to my own best thinking on how to do them. Some of those ideas were good, some so-so, and some were wet dreams. So much for “design philosophy”. I have built, and continue to build designs based upon new ideas, most not in an effort to make something to justify an Yggy 3 (III – more nose in the air, no?) I have been building
DACs since 1984. I have designed a fuck ton of them with a fuck ton of approaches. What this means is that I have traveled the DAC world, which is needed to have a worldview.
Let me put that in the context of an Yggy. Well, an Yggy is very similar to my first “Frankenstein” which was the first DAC with a megaburrito filter. The DSP processors in those days have been replaced with faster ones with more bits, the
DACs have gone from 16 to doubled 20 bit silicon. The only thing better was the BWD hookup which still is the best way by far I have found to connect a digital source (in those days, nothing but a CD player) to a DAC. Back in the 1980’s the digital audio tech was quickly changing so the Original 16 bit Theta Dspro went from 16 to
single 20bit technology within a 5-6 year period. Now this was back in the day when I was still trying to build the best. I was using fancy pants resistors and caps from a variety of vendors such as relcaps, caddock, vishay, and mills (among many others). I was even using teflon circuit boards which were a major pain in the ass – they would coldflow, sag into, and short out from the chassis below and were unsuitable for reliable surface mount and would collapse into the solder bath when the boards were flowed.
Now back then I was selling into the high-end market. It was becoming less and less fun. Finally, Crystal Semiconductor came out with digital audio parts based on sigma delta and delta sigma technology. I was excited! Something new! I built my first proto and it sounded like ass. Really like diseased ass. I some other bright ideas to improve the ds tech but it really, really sucked. As a bit of time went by and more and more vendors came out with delta sigma parts I realized just how bad it was. As the supply of multibit
DACs began to get more and more expensive, I saw the writing on the wall and got out of the DAC biz. I began to do a lot of surround digital processors, where it didn’t matter so much for sound since it was all about the video. I kept doing that for quite a while.
Twenty years went by and Schiit started. I caught up to current tech and realized that ds tech was all that was left. So I built some ds
dacs to buy some time to get new multibit designs going again with the Analog Devices AD5791 DACs. They were industrial and had a bunch of funny setups, glitch to get rid of, and odd formatting of the audio. In the meantime, resistor and capacitor technology had improved for less expensive parts, in fact orders of magnitude better for a lot less money – I applied it all to Yggy, and we used our scale it up know-how to make it cheaper.
Today at my age I am so fuckin’ happy to be out of the high-end business. All that matters there is that yours is the biggest, hardest, and longest. Period. I talked with a certain high-end vendor that I shared my very first high-end room at the Chicago CES show in 1977 for the original Theta Electronics. He shared the difficulties of out-performing and out-maneuvering all of his competitors to get the best possible reviews. I asked him how often that happened and he said not often enough. What I didn’t tell him is that Yggy gets great reviews as well (although he probably knows).
Well, the Yggy with the best commonly available high grade parts is typically within 10 ppm worst (absolute and rare) case compared to the most expensive designer parts. There is no guarantee fancy parts will be better, and many times they are worse, manufacturer to manufacturer and package to package. Typically they are also constrained from a standpoint of distributed capacitances and inductances, which can add odd resonances and slow them down.
Here is how it works in the real world. If the resistors are used as feedback elements, brand x may sound better. If they are filters or loads, brand y series better from 1 to 10000 ohms and brand z from 20000 ohms up, etc, etc. Now some are loyal to some brands, others to other brands. The brands have different sounds in different locations. If I followed this down as an obsession, I would be dead or crazy. Further, some combo of parts is better for classical and others for techno, and so on. It would be like trying to open Mike’s Mexican-Chinese-Italian-Indian-Coprophagic-Mediterranean-Japanese-Indonesian-Vegan-Vegetarian-French-Booger restaurant. When you try to please everyone, you please no one. No matter how much I bitch and shout that warranties vaporize as soon as the product is opened, there are those that will do so. I understand why some of you do so, but you still don’t get your warranty back. If you want a DAC that has the fanciest parts, there are many used to new car priced ones out there. I know there are those out there who would modify those as well. This is due to the Dunning-Kruger effect which explains why competent modifiers have their parades pissed upon by cretins.