Schiit Reference Sytem review: Freya into Yggdrasil, into Vidar

I am all for the latest round of Giant-killer DACs. I think it is wonderful that the kind of performance that only Meitner and a few select offered over 15 years ago is now quite widely available in $2000 range. Technological progress and competition is wonderful.

That said, I take JA of stereophile's comments as a serious concern with regard to the Yggdrasil. You can find other DACs in this price range that Stereophile has given a much cleaner "medical health checkup"!

Quote Stereophile:
"It's difficult to sum up the Schiit Yggdrasil's measured behavior. While the processor's analog circuitry is superbly well designed, its digital circuitry appears to have problems with high-level, high-frequency tones, and with the LSBs of 24-bit data. It's possible, of course, that the former will be rare with music, and that the latter will be obscured by the noise floors of recordings. But it does look as if the digital circuitry is not fully optimized. Hopefully, this could be addressed with a firmware upgrade.—John Atkinson
Read more at https://www.stereophile.com/content/schiit-audio-yggdrasil-da-processor-measurements#lvfQgKsUQg5tp3S...

STEREOPHILE: Its digital circuitry appears to have problems with high-level, high-frequency tones, and with the LSBs of 24-bit data. It’s possible, of course, that the former will be rare with music,

This says to me that it may never happen with playing music, maybe only with overloading with bench tests signals that Stereophile performed.
It maybe a fine balancing act designed into it by Mike Moffat to get the very best out of it, almost red-lining it to get the very best with music, before the nastie’s happen that Stereophile measured with bench signals.

Also I don't believe that Schiit advertises in Stereophile, make what you will from that. 

Cheers George

That said, I take JA of stereophile's comments as a serious concern with regard to the Yggdrasil. You can find other DACs in this price range that Stereophile has given a much cleaner "medical health checkup"!

Didn't we just go through this?
https://forum.audiogon.com/discussions/schiit-yggdrasil-21-bit

Don't you think you might be giving **WAY** to much credence to John Atkinson and Stereophile's review?

https://www.head-fi.org/threads/schiit-happened-the-story-of-the-worlds-most-improbable-start-up.701900/page-1130#post-13245036

See the above link for some comments from Jason Stoddard (Feb 8, 2017) relevant to Stereophile/Atkinson remarks about Yggdrasil.