Gungnir Multibit DAC Mini-review

[Puma Cat]

I thought I'd post my impressions after a few weeks living with my Schiit Gungnir Multibit DAC, also known to everyone as "Gumby".

PART I: The beginning of my journey with Gungnir

I bought my Gungnir back on Jan 2, 2014, a few months after it first shipped. Mine was a 1st Rev unit with the Gen 2 USB implementation. I upgraded to Gungnir from a Schiit Bifrost. At the time my set up was a Mac Mini running Audirvana and connecting via an AudioQuest Diamond USB cable to the USB port on Gungnir. One of the reasons I liked Schiit products was they designed them to be future-proof, and upgradeable for functionalities like USB interfaces, DAC chipset and the like, and also had a 5 year warranty. Also, when you reached out to Schiit for a question, or support, they got right back to you, usually the same day. You were corresponding to a real person at the other end.

I was very happy with this setup for quite a while; Gungnir was a nice step up from the Bifrost, and sounded smooth, musical and natural. When the Schiit Wyrd USB "de-crapifier" was released, I installed one between my Mac Mini and Gungnir using an Audioquest Coffee USB cable and obtained another level of overall sound quality and observed a concomitant improvement in sound quality, mostly due a lower noise floor and overall cleaner and quieter presentation. I should add here that from the time Schiit released their first DAC, the Bifrost, Jason Stoddard and Mike Moffat at Schiit were saying that USB really was not a good interface because it was dirty, grungy and hashy-sounding, and they didn't think it sounded very good; they really felt that S/PDIF was a much better-sounding interface. I paid them virtually no heed at the time because I did not have a digital source component or computer that could output S/PDIF via coax and I simply wasn't interested in using anything but the USB interface.

So, this is how things stayed until the end of 2016, when I bought and installed a Sonore microRendu. The MR brought another significant improvement in sound quality, and also allowed me to use it as a Roon endpoint, which I liked very much. The MR again provided an even cleaner USB signal to Gungnir than Wyrd, most likely because there was no longer a direct USB cable connection between the Mac Mini (via Wyrd) to the Gungnir. Instead, the MR was connected via ethernet from an Airport Express streaming files from the Mac Mini via WiFi, and then outputting via (very clean and re-clocked) USB to the DAC. So, there was no computer directly connected to Gungnir anymore. Personally, I've found this to be rather a big deal. General purpose consumer-electronics computers like Mac Minis are very noisy, grungy and hashy devices, and spew all sorts of high-bandwidth noise and crap all over the place, most significantly, into your audio amplification chain and speaker cables. Breaking this direct connection again resulted in a lower noise floor, ability to hear into the music, and improved naturalness and musicality to the sound. I gotta say, installing the microRendu had Gungnir sounding pretty d*mn good. So, by the end of 2016, and start of 2017, I was very happy with the Sonore microRendu and Gungnir. But, as the saying goes....IGNORANCE IS BLISS.