Hot off the press: Yggdrasil review

My experience is different. I find just having a DAC on will do most of the burn in (67.354689%...he he). The current running through most components in a class A circuit is constant. This constant voltage and current will burn in most power supply capacitors (which take the most time to burn in). The signal path resistors, and filter caps, transistors and tubes and especially the output caps in a tube unit will need to have signal run through them to fully burn them in. But even the output caps in a tube DAC will have high voltage on them....helping them burn in without a signal moving through them.

Having a signal go through the DAC while it is on will improve the sound further but most of the burn in can be done by just leaving it on. You need to have a load on the DAC output when burning in and playing music...this way some current is being modulated through the output stage as it has a load to draw some current with. Just keep your preamp or amp off and play music. Your preamp/amp has a load resistance to ground that helps pull current from the DAC.

BTW, this is the same with all electrical components (sources, preamps, amps). When I first assembled my first set of NCore NC400 amp modules and listened I wondered what the fuss what about....not good sound. Then I just left them on all night and 20 hours later listened again and....what a difference. Now I understood how good these modules were. No music was being played through the amps. However, days of playing music through the amp will bring more improvement. So, in the beginning (first 1000 hours) leave the component on as much as possible and play music through it as much as possible. Speaker cables and speakers need to be played for them to break in. There are some speaker cable burn in devices...but they are costly.

Yes indeed I was talking about the signal path which is key to the sound also!

I have one of the first batch that shipped; got my order in about 30 minutes after the Yggdrasil ordering on Schiit's site went live.

Fresh out of the box, I was hearing subtle things on familiar music that I hadn't noticed before. I tend to value detail… I want to hear whatever is on the recording, so I am happy with this DAC. Don't notice any bass lacking, but that can totally depend on how the song was mixed/mastered.

It's been powered on continuously since the end of April, with a few brief exceptions when I was swapping wires.

It replaced a Meitner MA-1 (which replaced a W4S). For my ears & system, it's a better match. The Meitner and Schiit approaches to DAC design are very different, to be sure.

No magic in the R2R ladder, just another design. Bill I will have to disagree with your statement. As you know I am building DHT DACs now and previously I was using the ESS Sabre32 Reference (ES9018) DAC chip. It sounded fantastic until we tried the R2R. In our DAC there was no going back. Much more analog, in fact we have been beating most very high priced analog set-ups as we are now out there demonstrating the dac. I also heard I think an early version of the Yggdrasil DAC with CEC 3N transport. I did not find the unit bright sounding but the CEC probably helps in that area. Nice dac maybe for the price but IMO, much left to be desired.

Happy Listening.