EDIT

OK, with my wife out on a trip, I have some time to catch up on my review chores. In this wonderful episode, you are treated to the measurements of the Schiit Modi 2. This guy retails for $99 which fit the budget nicely.It uses the Analog Devices AD 5547 DAC silicon. This is an older DAC (circa 2012) and quite pricey at some $20. The say it is the same chip used as in their Bifrost DAC.: that was a mistake. The DAC chip uses is from AKM: AK4490EQ. See later posts.Some of you may recall me having a poor experience with one of their $400 DACs a few years ago showing one of the worst correlated jitter measurements I have ever made. And my son could readily hear his computer activity through that DAC. Performance that lives to their name nicely.So it was with some ambivalent that I entered this test. Would this be a repeat of that incident or decent performance? Well, you decide.Before we get into the measurements, let me say that I went through hell getting this unit working with its drivers. They would throw an obscure error and nothing I tried worked. So I gave it to my son who quickly discovered that there is a toggle switch on the back. If you don't set it to "E" for expert, it will refuse to install its drivers! Cotton picking son of $#&^^%. Why not say that in the driver install package??? Wasted so much of my time. Anyway, these tests are with those drivers installed.As always, the weapon of choice is the 24-bit/48 Khz J-Test signal. This is a 12 Khz tone with a bit toggling. Ideally you should see a single sharp spike at that frequency and nothing else. Here is how the Schiit Modi 2 did as compared to my reference, iFi iDAC2 ($350):Oh man. We get a whole bunch of deterministic jitter in the form of those spikes which run at 1 Khz and other frequencies. In addition to that, we have random jitter almost occupying the entire audio spectrum widening the "skirt" in our 12 Khz tone.But the story does not end there. I ran it a second time and got different results! My son and I played with different CPU profiles on the computer connected to it (different from my measurement computer) and they all impacted the output of this DAC!!!Notice how the skirt shape changes and so does the amplitude of all the deterministic spikes. This shows clear lack of isolation from computer/USB bus.Either they don't measure their DACs, don't care or don't know how to design a clean DAC. Yes, -85 db distortion products is not likely audible and hence the reason they get away with such poor performance. But the engineer in me wants to throw up on it. Let the no-name Chinese vendors produce this stuff.Actually that might be an insult to Chinese vendors because this is what I got for the Origen+ DAC See how whistle clean it is compared to the Schiit at the same price point?I sure hope their higher priced stuff is better because my experience so far indicates anything but that. Please don't buy this DAC.Edit 2: more measurements and data starting here: https://audiosciencereview.com/foru...eview-schiit-modi-2-99.1649/page-6#post-54623 (same conclusions though).Edit 3: late testing shows the Schiit Modi 2 to be highly sensitive to USB power: https://audiosciencereview.com/foru...eview-and-measurements.1829/page-2#post-46217 This means that depending on what PC you plug it into, you will get different output! It may be worse than mine or better. Really bad form to not filter USB power better prior to use inside the DAC.As always, I welcome comments and corrections.EDIT: See the hardware teardown here: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/hardware-teardown-of-schiit-modi-2.2082/ EDIT: See additional measurements showing PC sensitivity here: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/...eview-schiit-modi-2-99.1649/page-8#post-57395