Schiit Yggdrasil -- 21 bit?

@almarg 

Great and very clear answer. Many thanks, super helpful.

You are not against independent reviews, are you?

Of course not.

Your original question is valid, however, it hadn't really been answered (accurately or inaccurately) until after my post, when shadorne provided additional clarification and almarg offered yet another possible explanation.

@gdhal 

Sure thing. Well, I have learned a lot from some of the answers. I think that Schiit took a courageous step to use R2R chips in their DACs. They have one groovy machine there.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvlW4bEjB5A


Couldn't resist!

Putting one chip on -ve and one chip on +ve of balanced will simply double the voltage but won’t increase the bit depth. There really is no way to increase bit depth without a DAC chip with greater bit depth so I think Schiit is stretching the truth. I think that they are trying to say there is still signal below 20 bit due to dithering (random noise) that they must add prior to bit truncation of the last 4 bits of the 24 bit input signal. If they don't have the processing power to do dithering (normally done on a computer) then the audio quality will be compromised.