Category Archives: Audio

Audio, Music, Personal Computing

Schiit Pi?

Those of you who saw the John Darko interview of Jason Stoddard and Mike Moffat filmed at the 2018 RMAF know that both have a passion for Schitty puns. During this interview, Mike teased a “Schiit Pi” concept. Mike’s idea was to embed an ARM processor in products to pick up additional digital signal processing tasks beyond the abilities of the Burr-Brown parts he had been using.

Jason is adamant that Schiit will not become a “software company”, that is offer IOS and Android apps or make devices having a significant user interface say like Roon Controller or Volumio remote. The ongoing maintenance of these products is simply too costly for the Schiit minimalist value first design esthetic.

A Minimalist Streaming Player

So can we make a minimalist streamer using a hatless Raspberry Pi? If we did, how would it sound? This product is as basic as a Roon Player can get. It turns out to be a very good one. Will Jason put it in the catalog? Probably not. Volumio got there first with more software integrated.

Those not wanting to tinker with hardware and software will find Volumio Primo a good alternative that provides a SBC and DAC supporting AirPlay, Rune, Roon, Spotify, and others but excludes the headphone amplifier. John Darko’s review is excellent and he likes the sound of Primo and the value offered. Primo is comparable, maybe not quite as sweet as the Allo Digi+ Signature. However, the ALLO devices requires you to bring your own DAC.

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Audio, Music

More Schiit — Modi and Magni

The Moocher had been mixing church service recordings using the DAC and amplifier built into his 2017 5k Retina display iMac. This sound is not bad but not the best. After a year of fatiguing sound and an inflating checking account, it was time to purchase something better for the desk. Having Gumby aboard for 9 months, what better choice than Schiit’s Modi and Magni. These two $99 products account for 1/2 the company’s revenue.

So, $200 gets you a complete personal audio system less speakers or headphones. How does Jason perform this magical feat? (The Moocher is pretty sure Jason has been to the Highway 51 Crossroads.) First, the design is minimalist, just the bits needed for brilliant musical reproduction are present, no less and no more in this music first design. Point of sale graphics, fancy cases, auto input selection logic, etc are all left out in favor of a sophisticated circuit topology, carefully selected components, and quality construction and testing. Second, they sell direct. No distributors or retailers adding vigorish. Third, they have low failure rates resulting from careful design, design testing, quality builds, and build testing. Everything runs for a day on the burn in rack to catch weak parts or assembly flaws.

References

  1. https://darko.audio/?s=modi John Darko reviews Modi and Magni.
  2. https://www.schiit.com/products/modi-1

Revision history

  1. Spell “Culcha Vulcha” correctly
  2. Add a playlist

Play List

In no particular order, the records I played to evaluate Modi and Magni with my Sennheiser HD555 headphones.

  • Trinity Session, Cowboy Junkies recorded this record on a shoestring in a chapel using an Ambisonic stereo microphone. The classical headphone record.
  • In My Life, Judy Collins Elektra debut an early stereo singer songwriter recording that shows off her great voice
  • Belafonte Live at Carnegie Hall, The RCA audiophile classic. Listen for the trio behind Belafonte’s outrageous tenor. The clearer the small sounds from the guitar, the better the gear. Challenging to resolve distinctly. Gumby does it. Modi gets most of it.
  • Thile-Mehldau, The Mac Arthur genius and friend play mandolin-piano jazz. Captures Chris Thile’s genius at pulling small detail from his mandolin and keeps piano and mandolin distinct. Brad Mehldau’s vocal debut on the Scarlet Town track. The duet harmonies are Chris and Brad, not Chris and reverb.
  • Amir, Belgian singer-songwriter Tamino’s debut record. Man does his voice smoulder. Of Egyptian ancestry, he sings in quarter tones to haunting effect. Amazing technique.

Availability

Order directly from Schiit and Magni and Modi will appear within a week. Schiit offers a 2 week audition period within which the products may be returned no harm, no foul.

Unboxing

Packaging is strictly utilitarian as no point of sale enticements are needed. Packaging is also robustly designed for direct mail delivery. Packaging for the two are designed to ship Magni and Modi as a pair. If you tried to drop-kick the box (not recommended) you’d be more likely to hurt a toe than the product as robust cardboard is used with the two products packed in individual robust boxes that are packed in an outer box sized to take the two together.

Modi

Modi, in the smaller box, includes a micro-USB cable and a 5 watt USB power supply of decent quality. Alternately, you can use any decent (low noise like those from Allo, HiFiBerry, and Raspberry Pi Foundation or Apple iPad) 5 to 15 watt USB supply. Modi includes additional power supply filtering to clean up the USB source and make the needed voltages from the 5 volt bulk DC.

Magni

Magni comes in the larger of the two boxes which also includes a power transformer. Magni’s internal linear power supply develops the regulated voltages for the line stage, preamp output line driver, and the headphone amplifier. A short listen reveals why Jason went this route. The cans are dead quiet when nothing is playing.

If you order short RCA interconnects, Schiit will package them with Magni. There is a little extra space in the box for this purpose. A bit of protective foam and 5-mil poly packaging prevents scratching in shipment.

Setup

There’s not much setup but just enough that you should read the instruction leaflets with each product. Lets start with Modi.

We ran into a couple of things. First, the Moocher missed disabling the Mac internal speakers so was hearing them rather than the headphones for first playing. Second, you have to set the input on Modi and turn the level up on Magni. When the level is full left, the amp is dead quiet, dead dead quiet. The level control is active with both the line outs and the phone outs.

Modi

Setting up Modi is simple:

  • Connect Modi to a source.
  • Connect USB power if needed
  • Connect audio outputs to Magni’s inputs
  • Set the toggle switch to select USB, SPDIF, or TOSlink (optical SPDIF) input to service.
  • Turn the power switch on.
  • Select Schiit Modi 3 as MacOS audio output device.
  • Enable Schiit Modi 3 as a Roon output zone.

Modi has 2 USB inputs, one is a USB audio output device micro USB connector that can supply power. The second is a power-only micro USB connector. If your USB audio source complains about excessive load, connect the provided USB power adapter to the second micro USB connector. Modi will automatically disconnect the power supply from the signal plus power connector.

Magni

Magni has a small bit of setup also. There are 3 controls, a sensitivity switch, a power switch, and a volume control.

  • Connect Modi and Mangi using decent RCA connectors.
  • Connect the power transformer. This is best mounted where it can be supported or with a pig tail cord (cheap from Cable Matters). Gravity needs to be in your favor to keep it connected. It will likely come out of a vertical plug.
  • Set the gain switch to high for use with headphones or low for use with in ear monitors.
  • Optionally, connect the rear panel audio outs to a power amplifier.
  • Connect your unbalanced headphones on the front panel.
  • Set the volume control to 9 O’clock or so.
  • Disable computer internal speakers

The Sound

Magni and Modi have the Schiit house sound. They are naturally voiced with no apparent coloration and dead quiet. Silence separates the notes. The pair offer a rich and engaging musical experience for the cost of a handful of concert tickets.

The pair are a great way to audition the Schiit house sound before purchasing one of the larger DACs or power amps. If you like what you hear with these two, it is likely that you will give the more expensive products a friendly hearing.

The pair are small enough to set on an end table or night stand for evening listening.

Small Ensemble Reproduction

Modi and Magni resolve the small sounds in Chris Thile’s mandolin playing on the eponymous Thile-Mehldau recording while preserving the authority of Brad’s left hand on the piano. Right hand piano play dances in space behind the mandolin.

Tonal balance is what you’d expect hearing them live. On Scarlet Town, Brad’s voice is distinct from Chris’s voice on the duet parts. On other DAC’s the Scarlet Town vocals have sounded like Chris was accompanying himself multi-tracked. But not with Gumby or Modi.

Big Band Reproduction

Moving on to Snarky Puppy’s Culcha Vulcha record, Modi and Mangi easily deal with the complex play of this post bop jazz funk big band. Snarky Puppy play is beastly in its complexity yet masterfully tracked and mixed to put all the parts together in balance. Michael League’s bass gives each track a hefty funk bottom with percussion, horns, guitars, and synths on top. Mini-Moog and Hammond B3 are in the mix and Mark Letteri’s searing guitar tone is there in all its overdrive glory. These little guys bring this complex music with authority that belies their small size and small price. Tarova, Gemini, Grown Folks, Go, are fan favorites on this record.

Voice Reproduction

  • Chris Thile — well he still sounds like an “oboe going through puberty”, his description opening Live For Hear for the first time.
  • Tamino, well he smoulders gloriously.
  • Harry Belafonte’s complex tenor keeps its rich texture and overtone structure. The small stuff happening in the trio is almost as distinct as when rendered by Gumby. It’s there but the guitar is not quite as clear as when rendered by multi-bit Gumby.
  • Judy Collins on In My Life is just beautiful. I’ve been listening to this record for 50 years and her voice still amazes me on this beautifully tracked and mastered record.

Audio

Digital Recording of House of Worship Services

This is the first of a series of articles about contemporary digital recording practice in a volunteer church service recording context. The advent of digital mixers and digital audio workstations has completely changed this game allowing a patient amateur to make a clean pleasing service recording for distribution to shut-in and traveling members.

Those wishing to learn more about copyright in house of worship program production are advised to see reference 1 for a complete discussion. Copyright law specifically exempts houses of worship from royalty payments for material performed or presented as part of a worship service proper. Houses of worship are required to pay royalties for non-worship use of copyrighted material not in the public domain. For this reason, we distribute service recordings to members on physical media and include only material copyright by the church or our speaker in our weekly sermon podcast that is publicly available.

After the break, we’ll talk about track capture off of a digital mixer. Although not hard, each mixer has its quirks and limitations so our intent here is to alert you to typical challenges and limitations rather than to provide switchology for a specific mixer or mixer family.

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Audio, Music, Technology

Music Discovery in the 21st Century

Are streaming services evil? For some. For others, they are the gateway to new artists, concerts, and record purchases. Audiophiles that have made the leap are in this latter camp. There’s more to life than the next Beatles reissue. Read on to learn how Roon, Qobuz, and Tidal combine synergisticly to promote artists and music. Roon 1.6 Radio is the secret.

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Audio, Personal Computing

Allo Digione gets a Face

John Darko of Darko.Audio fame asked what you hide your Raspberry Pi based audio player behind. That got me thinking. Give it a face like a Bryston Audio BDP-Pi player. Could that be done?

John was a fan of the RoPieee Linux plus Roon Bridge distribution so I gave RoPieee a try. In reading the RoPieee installation notes, I noticed that it supported the Raspberry Pi 7 inch touchscreen display. Having one lying around, I decided to add it to the basic Signature One player.

As always with DIY, some assembly is required and it is not all in the fine manual. I was using my display with an Allo DigiOne Signature HAT assembly. This HAT blocks access to the GPIO power pins. Oops — what’s the work around. Keep reading after the break.

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Audio, Personal Computing

MacOS Software Defined Radio with GQRX and RTL-SDR

Radio, like most else, has gone digital. In the early days of digital signal processing, pioneers realized that many modulation and demodulation techniques could be performed by digital computation.

As computers became cheaper and faster and integrated circuits became cheaper and faster, it was inevitable that the guts of radio receivers and transmitters would be mostly digital and that computers would do much of what went on inside new radios.

This post will describe the initial exploration of GQRX and RTL-SDR here at Dismal Manor. Most of what is already written on the Internet neglects to mention a couple of details the Moocher learned the hard way. Find out what these are after the break.

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Audio

Gumby is a good gumby

I’ll try to avoid the schiit puns as Gungnir Multibit (Gumby) arrived and is settled in my audio rack. Gumby is a good Gumby! Jason Stoddard and Mike Moffat founded Schiit about a decade ago to scratch their audio design itch. Schiit has an unusual philosophy and take on high fidelity audio equipment, that it exists to serve the love of music and not to be techno-sculpture in the lounges of the rich. Rather than making a big statement piece for the wealthy, they began by making affordable $100 devices for those wishing for more than headphones plugged into an iBook. And they set out to show that you could build here of mostly US made stuff and be profitable.

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