Stepping up the game from the Magni

Why not the Magni?

I gave the Magni 3 a glowing review, and said that everyone getting into audio should own one. I stand by that. Moving up from the Magni there's 2 direct options. The Magnius, and the Asgard 3. These both have substantial power overhead compared the the poor little magni with it's wall wart of a power brick. The big feature difference between these in terms of physical features is that the Magnius is pretty much 2 magni in one box, and balanced, where the Asgard does away with balanced in favour of raw power through single ended output.

A whole lot of detail, even to a fault

Where to even start on this DAC. Features... All of the features... This is a balanced DAC, so expect to want a balanced AMP with this one. Inputs galore. USB, coax digital, optical, AES, and even bluetooth. If you have a thing that you want to make sound, this can probably do it. It can output both to balanced, or single ended, so this will work with pretty much any amp or powered monitors. It is built as a balanced architecture and will sound best as such, but it's nice that it offers both.

This Schiit is pretty decent

What is there to be said about Schiit that hasn't been said by basically anyone that has ever heard their gear. It punches way above it's price range. I'll be comparing this directly to the Apple USB dongle as it's a great, clean, baseline to compare to. Every built in DAC/AMP will sound different on phones or laptops that have them still fit in, so it seems like a fair comparison to something people have heard, and are cheap to obtain, and my personal baseline for portable audio on the cheap.

R2R on the go!

Something a bit different coming from me here, but this is a portable DAC/AMP. I'll have to review this as an entire unit as the DAC and AMP can't be separated unlike most of what I look at. It's also not a Delta Sigma, so this is going to be a bit longer than usual. I'll try to break it down as far as I can, because this one is for sure not something everyone will like, but it is wonderful in ways that nothing else I've owned has been able to do.

This may be cheap, but this Schiit isn't shit

So you just got your first set of decent headphones and need an amp, but you don't know what to get. If it's under $500, and you aren't looking to break the bank, I can't recommend this enough.

Why do I need an amp?

Everything that makes sound needs an amp, but why a dedicated amp is probably what you meant. Without being pedantic, this is the part of the audio chain that takes the sound from the very quiet "line level" and brings it up to audible volumes. The amps job is to give your headphones both the voltage, and current they need to not only get loud, but have enough power to control the driver tightly so it can make more than one note at a time. Unless you like hearing only one sound at a time, and not something as complex as music, this becomes important.

We went really fast

Vzbot was great. It really was. Speeds and feeds were off the charts compared to my Switchwire, or even a fiend's Trident. This machine has been as much of a learning experience as Switchwire was, even though it wasn't my first printer. I built it to be as simple as possible. Less moving parts, less features, less QOL. The bare minimum. I knew that I was going to blow things up. Break them, change them, not be happy with this and that, so I went minimal to leave it as a playground, and it became one.

Time to go really fast

I spent quite a bit of time designing modifications for Vorons, and couldn't really agree with their limits and bad design choices. That lead me to looking for a better base printer design. I stumbled onto Annex and Vzbot series printers, and for cost reasons alone, I decided that a Vzbot 330 scratch build was what I was insane enough to build.

Speedy boi update

I've been learning some CAD to start planning. I'm leaving the design to be ready for 48v steppers, so they will be shown, though may take a cuple of iterations to actually include. So far I've got the carbon fiber gantry modeled, as well as a backpack to relocate all of the DC electronics to, banishing the 24/48v AC power supplies and SSR to the basement where they won't be touched. Also shown is the Mantis toolhead that will be pushing some massive plastic, as well as giving a much needed cooling upgrade over a single 5015 fan of the Stealthburner, not to mention the weight reduction. Note that the backpack won't be translucent, but it's impossible to see things if it's shown in black in the slicer, so bear with me on colours ect.

Time to go fast

While my switchwire has been a lot of pain, and fun, but mostly pain, I'm back at it. There's some things that I love, and hate about the switchwire, and while I intend to still use it, I think it's time to build something that not only addresses those problems, but goes faster. This is just a really rough writeup of my thoughts that will change over time, but is here to keep track of what the plans are, and how they change over time.

The plan

The current plan is to start with a Voron Trident kit from Formbot, similar to where my Switchwire started from, and modify it to hell and back. The Trident is a fixed gantry CoreXY printer, which is generally pretty fast, even compared to my Switchwire already, but the need for speed is a thing. Mods will be broken down into 4 categories. QOL, Speed, Quality, and Eventually.

This has been.... A journey...

I have submit for, and gotten, a serial number! I am now the proud owner of VS.288 and yes, the audio quality is bad, but I have no clue how to use Davinci Resolve.