Jason, you are such a tease! I take it that with the introduction of the new dacs, there will be analog upgrade boards for the gungnir and bifrost as well?

I don't think the tech from Yggy will trickle down much, but there is a new AKM4495 DAC that we're playing with. When we know what it sounds like, we'll make a decision on whether or not to offer it as an upgrade. But the jury is still out.

Quote from: Maxvla on March 24, 2014, 12:55:28 AM

Jason, will the Rag and Yggy be stackable? Temps/interference a problem?

Should be. Depends on how crazy hot the shunt regulators are in a full chassis, but I expect it will be fine--there's a ton of surface area there.

Really looking forward to Yggdrasil. The Empirical Overdrive and the MSB Analog are brilliant, but their prices mean they are out of reach of most people. That price class seems to be where everybody wants to be now though, and to a lesser extent, $3-4K.

The ~$2K market is currently underserved, and the models that are there are mostly uninspiring. I'm very happy to see something besides yet another 9018 or PCM1792A DAC.

Does anyone know if there will be any new mid-range Schiit products coming out this year such as maybe a Valhalla 2 or a mid-priced tube amp? I really like the Vali, but was hoping they might make an improvement to the Valhalla as I really dig the original Valhalla.

Yep, and that was wrong, too. Expect $1699. Sorry, it's a pricey piece.

Official pricing ^

A quick update on Ragnarok:
 
True "production qualifier" Ragnaroks went out early this week, including one to Jude here at Head-Fi, for early listens. Right now, the only person you may hear from is Jude, and that depends on what he hears, how it works for him, etc. The others went to beta listeners under NDA, so you won't hear from them.
 
So, what is a "production qualifier," and what does this mean in terms of shipping?
 
A production qualifier is a product built from production parts and boards, which is used to identify any final small tweaks needed before we release the full kit into production. The production qualifiers we sent out have been tested, burned-in, run on headphones and speakers, and we think they're pretty fine. However, a production qualifier is a final sanity check before we run everything. As I've said, ad nauseum, we really want these to be perfect when we ship.
 
In the case of Ragnarok, we've already identified a couple of things that we need to fix, most notably the screen being wrong on the inner chassis (left and right inputs are reversed on the RCAs, duh). This will most likely be the pacing item--waiting for the re-screened metal. This shouldn't take more than a couple of weeks to turn around, though. I hope.
 
In terms of ordering/shipping, this means that orders probably won't open up this month, but they will certainly open in May. I'll make a big announcement here, and to the press, when we're ready. Apologies again for being insanely late.
 
A quick update on Yggdrasil:
 
In terms of Yggy, we're really, really hoping to have something that looks and acts like a final product at TheShow Newport. This may or may not happen, but we're going to try.
 
The ramp from first show to shipping should be much shorter than Ragnarok, since much of the truly hard work is done--including the biggest, baddest digital filter out there--18,000+ taps with closed-form solution retaining the original samples. Much of the dev time in Yggy was simply (a) getting this filter right, and (b) exploiting the processing power of the new DSP architecture to extend the coefficients down into meaningless numbers--hence the insane number of taps.
 
Thanks again for your patience on this--and look at the bright side: since we're no longer teasing you with upcoming products, everything else that appears this year will be a complete surprise!
 
(Full disclosure: nothing "above" Ragnarok or Yggdrasil are planned.)

Oh, and Yggy's digital filter? 18,000+ taps, running a proprietary algorithm based on a 1917 Western Electric paper on time-domain optimization (yes, nine-teen seven-teen, 1917), perfected by a Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at Iowa State (to get around the divide-by-zero problem) and implemented by a RAND Corp mathematician.
 
The result? The biggest, baddest digital filter in the world. The only true closed-form digital filter that retains the original samples.
 
Combine this with PCM and a ladder DAC, and forget "add the music to the noise, then filter out the noise" SDM approaches.
 
In our opinion, of course...