If I attend, I'll bring the Dangerous Source.

Thank you for your impressions. To my understanding, that's politeness is all in the AKM "Velvet Sound" DAC chip. The Solaris has a custom filter too so it's not the filter. I'm using an AK4490 based Grace M900 as a headphone amp and portable dac/pre (monitor controller I guess) around the...

Has anyone compared the Convert 2 to the Source in terms of tone and timbre? The Source sounded fairly normal to me when I briefly heard it and in this thread someone mentioned that the Convert was warmer than the Yggy, which I already consider to be warm and have fat bass. The Gearslutz guys...

A little loud but nice location! I got to try all of the Schiit tube amps again but missed out on trying the IFI gear. None of the Schiits were really my thing with all of them being rather bassy and the Valhalla 2 displaying noticeable grain.

Yes exactly, the minimum phase filters are usually done over DSP but some like the Schiit Fulla and Jotunheim DAC portions use analog filtering. These are cause the destruction of stereo width and imaging with minimum phase filters. Of course it is applied to both channels, I don't know why that...

That is the downside of minimum phase filters; the change in arrival time of different frequencies is not uniform and greatly affects the perceived stereo image. Yes DACs with minimum phase filters will apply it to both channels and yes it collapses the stage almost always when compared to the...

USB-C and USB 3.0 won't matter as they won't decrease the latency. The USB 2.0 bit-rate is already high enough for multiple i/o channels of audio. More power won't really matter either as better thought out devices are mains powered from the wall or have the option of mains power like the...

You can hear minimum phase and slow roll off filters collapse the stage by paying attention to the locations of instruments when abing between filters and DACs. This is much easier to hear than the roll-off most of the time. It's not hard if you aren't deaf in one ear, focus on the location of...

Believe what you want to believe about everything you just said yet they measure different, use different parts that sound different, and people with more experience than you can hear the difference. Just because you can't or choose not to, doesn't mean they can't.

Minimum phase and NOS analog filters produce noticeable errors in stereo separation as they are uneven in the time domain, which is why they typically aren't used. Please don't derail the thread. Minimum phase filtering is measurably inferior in both the time and frequency domain and it is used...

My experience is that linear phase, fast roll off filters on well-implemented DACs tend to be the most natural/neutral; the impulse ringing is masked by other noise and basically impossible to hear unless it is causing IMD in downstream gear which it probably isn't thus it is just the "best" as...

Also @fjrabon , I have come full circle after spending a little more time on F1 with the Grace. I bought an M900 myself and now think it sounds better than anything Schiit makes below a thousand dollars. It just sounds much more transparent (easier to pick out guitar amps and vocal effects) with...

Sounds like a synching issue with the phone and the USB receiver chip in the Grace. Are you using the camera connector kit?

It drove the Eikon and Sennheisers fine. Don't see why it couldn't drive the Atticus.

Yeah I am still looking for one in the US myself. Word of warning, people reported a little bit of noise with super sensitive IEMs with the Grace.

Wait for the M900. The Grace M9xx sounded way better, has much better display, better volume adjustment, and enough power for dynamic cans. The M900 is newer and has S/PDIF input which is useful for feeding it from audio hardware. You could easily just carry it over to your stereo and plug it in.

Has anyone compared this to other AK4490 based products like the Grace M9XX?

@Kermeli HD 600 might be what you want as it's under 300 bucks right now on Amazon. HD 650 is overdamped and slightly dark, which means the percussion in overly compressed recordings will just sound worse than usual but the staging will be way better than what you have. I'm playing Nokturnal...

I'll hopefully be there with my current rig and maybe something new.

The Elear kinda sucks for metal. Way too bassy, makes kicks ridiculously loud, and it has that crunchy aluminum tweeter treble sound. There's also a serious hole in the upper mids / low treble that kills the distortion. Reminds of a scaled up closed headphone rather than hi-fi.

I love this unit. The best transportable dongle ever and equal to the Schiit Modi Magni 2U stack. Just be sure to keep it on Filter 1 for no high frequency roll-off. I used to think the M2U stack was better but nah, it's not really, just cheaper and the AK4490 DAC in this is way better...

Orpheus/Stax e-stat chain: Something was wrong with the Orpheus this chain (really bad synergy or physical headphone decay maybe). Leonard Cohen sounded like has singing through a voicebox like Peter Frampton while on the Lamda Signature, he sounded like Leonard Cohen. I don't really want to...

Great meet, great store.

I use that same stack. The internal DAC in the Jot is much much worse and the Jot, while faster and cleaner, is much less even tonally than the Asgard 2. There's no reason to upgrade it. Save money for Gungnir multibit if you want a huge upgrade.

The one thing I would be concerned about is an OTL tube amp stamping its OTL bass on the sound from DACs with bass issues. Ryu's Speedball Crack fixed all the major bass issues with the Bifrost Multibit. One thing that would be interesting is to compare them to a relatively neutralish solid...