A special delivery arrived from Texas this afternoon and I rushed home from work knowing that my fiancé was having a girl’s weekend down the shore in Cape May and that my neighbors would hate me well before she returned on Sunday. The Skoll arrived well packaged and setup was a breeze: I plugged in the single ended inputs and ground wire where they go, hooked it up to my Freya+ via the balanced outs and ins on each device, plugged in the wall wart, turned it on and it was ready to go.
My first spin was Hermanos Gutierrez’s Sonido Cosmico, a stark and lush, Dan Auerbach produced vinyl of southwest & spaghetti western inspired, guitar based post rock. At first blush, it’s an order of magnitude better than the Mani 2 rhat I had hooked up previously. Whereas the Mani was a bit bass shy, that was not the case with the Skoll: the low end was significantly more present, but utterly consistent and never boomy. Detail was improved, as was imaging and staging with a Denon DL-110 high-output moving coil cartridge. Next up is Steely Dan’s UHQR version of Aja and the Skoll really shines here.
The unit is handsome enough, as are most pieces of Schiit, but it’s not without quibbles: first of all, it’s just 1-1/2” high and looks a bit incongruent compared to the 2” high, Bifrost 2/64 and Freya + I have sitting next to it. It’s a niggling complaint, but I would have preferred it to be a little thicker, to make it matchy-matchy with the rest of my Schiit. That leads directly to my other quibble: the print on the front of the unit is exceedingly small and in a quirky enough font that makes it utterly inscrutable. Luckily, I didn’t need to adjust it at all from the factory settings, which are optimized for MM carts, but still, it makes futzing about with it challenging; a bigger case might have allowed bigger type and better readability. Still, my little whinges not withstanding, it’s a fantastic unit with excellent dynamics and ultra low noise. My vinyls have never sounded better!
