HiFi Subjectivist ¦ Audio Forum ¦ NVA User Group

My Wyrd has arrived, but I haven't got the cables I want for it yet, so will be drawing no conclusions other than "bloody Hell, that LED's bright" at the moment.

No schiit?

The LED on my Magni3 is also lighthouse strength. I have vast amounts of masking tape over my hifi gear now. Stops me from going completely blind.

My Wyrd has just been delivered. See if I can fire it up this evening.

I've just lashed it up, using my Chinese "Nordost" cable and put on Marcus Miller's "Renaissance" album, and it sounds rather good, as it should. TBH I can't tell if it's doing any good yet, but it's certainly not doing any harm. The bass on Track one - Detroit - sounds tight, snappy, and just like a bass guitar should sound.

WTF!!!

Just fired it up for a brief listen. 'Oh, Schiit' was the first of several exclamations.

More later.

RESULT!

I've just picked up the 0.3m and the 0.5m WireWorld Starlight 7 USB leads I've been watching (and keeping very quiet about) on eBay for £100.00 the pair, including postage, and paid for them both using my Nectar Points.

That's the cabling for the Oehlbach and the Schiit sorted.

You've got the Oehlbach as well?????

Fretless wrote: ↑Fri Jan 03, 2020 8:59 pm You've got the Oehlbach as well?????

I got a duff one. It needs sending back, but there's no way I was going to do that over the holiday period.

Fretless wrote: ↑Fri Jan 03, 2020 3:06 pm

The LED on my Magni3 is also lighthouse strength. I have vast amounts of masking tape over my hifi gear now. Stops me from going completely blind.

My Mani was the same- l was able to open the case and easily move the led slightly sideways- no need for tape

You guys should bring a digital set up to Kegworth...

And anyone who shouts 'Worra loada schiit...' -
I said it first.

Getting the obvious jokes out of the way. It's time to get serious. The Wyrd (pronounced 'weird'. Yes, honestly) sits neatly next to the Magni3 headphone amp and looks cool. Schiit gear doesn't like the BMU for some reason. So the Wall-warts are plugged into a normal power socket.

A spare USB lead was found that is of reasonably good audio quality - it came with an Onkyo Ipod transport/dock thingy - and that will have to do until a second Inakustik Excellence cable arrives next week. This lead runs from the Tinkerboard to the Wyrd, the Inakustik from there to the Teradak Chameleon DAC. For the moment I'll leave the Jitterbugs in place.

Turning on. The trick with USB is that devices have to find each other on startup, so you begin at the receiving end of the chain, turning on the DAC, then the Wyrd, then the Asus TB, at which point the second (bright) light shines on the Wyrd to confirm the connection.

The Wyrd is, effectively, a single-output USB-hub. It takes the incoming datastream, repackages and resynchronises it and than sends it off again. As most Pc's, laptops, Pi's and so on are very electrically noisy around USB transmission this 'decrapification' would appear to be needed for our delicate audiophile ears.

What the Wyrd also is, is an LPSU that will smoothly power a USB DAC like, for instance, an Audioquest Dragonfly (future experiment). You could stack 2 Wyrds with one powering a Tinkerboard and the other cleaning the output signal, groovy!

Right, things are hooked up, switched on and ready to rumble. Although, with the lesser quality cable involved I'll be quite content if the SQ isn't any worse than it was.

What I immediately hear is clarity. A projection of detail that detaches completely from the speakers. Crispness, airiness, more definition around individual sound sources.

There does seem to be a touch of brittleness and I attribute that to the Onkyo cable but this certainly improves further on the already-astonishing abilities of the Tinkerboard and the combination with the Wyrd still comes in as cheaper than the Allo DigiOne Signature which is about as good an SPDIF source as you can get.

It's time for me to listen to loads of music now.

Hang loose.