I belive what your saying and surely the choke has SOMETHING to do with it. I can justify my hunch.
Excuse me if it’s already been discussed. Been a while, but there was a company called Mercury I believe, the upgraded stock Marshall guitar amplifiers by adding a choke. Their beef with the way Marshall stock guitar amplifiers were being made is the fact that the choke had been omitted from the amplifier. They say the removal of the choke severely impaired the sound of the amplifiers. If I’m wrong about this someone correct me.
I've never heard that story before, but it sounds completely believable to me.
And on a completely unrelated note: +1 vote for LSST with a hint of (artificial) tube glow. I mean, if you don’t have the real thing, at least the appearance of warmth would be nice. All in my head, I know
Jason mentioned that LISST v2 will look different than v1. So the thought has crossed my mind that they could look pretty cool with the board standing upright in a domed glass case instead of a metal can. Add one of Schiit's ubiquitous orange SMD LEDs on each side as close to the base of the tube as possible, and you might end up with something that looks pretty sick. And since glass is a lot worse when it comes to heat dissipation than the metal cans are, I'd expect them to run almost as hot as a tube, too. ;p
But Schiit's got dealing with metal down to a T by this point, glass is something that would be pretty new to them. The last thing they/we need is yet another new source for more production headaches. Might also cause issues with shielding. So, no glass.
Would look pretty sick, though.
Connect a pair of inefficient, low impedance planars to your Aegir. Or an electrostatic energizer. Mine makes a great head phone amp for those uses. For more efficient, higher impedance head phones, my Mjolnir sounds better.
I am thinking about using my Aegirs for my ribbon headphones from now on. I'll have to test and see how well they play together with that impedance converter box thingy, as that's rated at 6 ohm and it's asking for around 100W. I've been using my Vidars for this, but they're a bit too analytical for these ribbons. So, maybe two Aegirs might do the trick? Maybe later today…
Not sure how many of you have lived or worked with native Germans before, but... "
nothing 
short of phenomenal" is pretty much the highest praise possible. How do I know this? In a previous life, I spent two years commuting back-and-forth from Chicago to Munich. Early on, one of my Austrian colleagues pulled me aside after a long day of meetings and said
"Don, we all quite enjoy working with you, but I must say that our German colleagues are a bit put off by your constant use of hyperbole".
Can confirm.
I grew up just a few miles from the Austrian border, so my brain immediately went to reading that quote in Christoph Waltz's voice and accent.
What, just me? Ok…
Yes. Minute details that were masked in the past: the decay of a single note into silence, the echo in the recording venue, a saxophonist wetting her lips - yes, really. And and power seems effortless, I think I said something about a small V12 engine with a very light flywheel... but it's more like a F1 power unit. Elastic, instantaneous, tracking the throttle/input signal to the microsecond. Just freaking sick, I say.
If I may be so shameless and add to your F1 engine analogy that, while I agree with the power delivery side of it, those are the epitome of unpleasant and shouty noise.
Personally, my first instinct was to say that Tyr's power delivery is more akin to a Tesla Model S Plaid. But then again, that car's acceleration is more of a punch in your face than anything actually pleasant, and the Model S Plaid, overall, is a bit of a one-trick-pony, too. Tyr is neither of those things.
So I'll say this: Tyr's power delivery, at least to me, is akin to that of a Rolls-Royce Phantom. You press down the pedal, and before you know it, without any unnecessary theatrics, you've broken about half a dozen laws.
How much power does Tyr have? "It's adequate."
(Full disclosure: That "how much power? - adequate!" joke I actually stole from Jason. But now that I've heard Tyr myself, I fully get what he meant.)
There's that word again. The rapid drum attack at the beginning of Rhianna's "Watch and Learn" - it jumps out into the room from pure blackness. And the Tyr's control over the B&W's woofers is unlike anything I've ever heard before - regardless of volume level. Right now I'm way off-axis, upstairs in the office typing this (yeah, why am I not sitting downstairs with my laptop?) and the bass response is just amazing. No need for a loudness control, here... and yeah, Loki Max is still bypassed.
Mhm. For me, however, Lokius will have to remain in the chain. But this time around, I'll have to turn the bass
down instead of up, lest I risk losing my lease…
Nice dig, dude. Very well executed. <G>
My dislike for the guy knows no bounds, I'm sad to admit.
I absolutely understand where objectivists come from; without a good way to audition gear oneself, and with all of that vague and highly subjective audiophile lingo, hard numbers
do offer a certain sense of reprieve.
But
that dude's so god-damned f#@&ing smug and arrogant, it just makes my skin crawl.
Although, playing devil's advocate for a second, I also kinda get it. With the sheer amount of verbal diarrhea he keeps spewing into the world, he's probably faced with having to defend himself day-in, day-out, and with ever increasing intensity. Do that long enough, and the laws of self-preservation dictate that you'll have very little choice but to turn into an arrogant prick like that…
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
IMHO Yggy OG A2 is phenomenal in its own right. In my mind, the Tyrs let Yggy speak clearly for the first time, and I'm thinking: wow, can that dude sing!
I think I read once somewhere, and I hope to be corrected if I'm wrong, that
@Baldr won't (officially) attempt to build anything "bigger-and-better" than Yggy, as he wouldn't know how to improve upon it in any way meaningful enough to warrant the step up in price. Yggy, if you will, is his Magnum Opus. And I think rightfully so.
The last thing I want is to put words into
@Jason Stoddard's mouth, and I want to stress that I don't think that he's ever mentioned anything even remotely along those lines, but I can't imagine that Tyr can really be meaningfully topped at this point, either.
I think Tyr is Jason's Yggy in this sense.
Nelson Pass is a bit of a personal hero of mine. The way he designs his amps is nothing short of artful. But since I've heard Tyr, Nelson's no longer alone up there.
I sent a can I buy some lisst's? inquiry to Schiit but never heard back.
That's weird, they always answer their emails. Have you checked your spam folder?
As to your inquiry to them, I've asked them the same thing a few months back, and the reply was: They don't have any 1st-gen LISST in stock anymore.
The Tyr data is up at Schiit:
Distortion is 0.0032 % at 8 ohms and 0.0085 % at 4 ohms.
Barely beats Vidar, but does.
Aegir has 3 zeros after the dot, but more noise so thd+n is higher than Tyr.
As I've mentioned above, I do get where you're coming from with your focus on numbers, but trust me, they don't mean a thing.
Here's a relatively affordable way for you to experience for yourself what I mean by that:
Get yourself a Topping E30 and a Modius. They're both based on the AK4493, and both can be picked up for cheap in the used gear market.
Listen to both of them — and use Modius fully single-ended to keep things a bit more fair.
One of them, the E30, is pretty much the best-measuring DAC in the 200 Dollar price range, the other, well, isn't.
You will find that one of the two will sound rather heavenly, and the other will sound like complete a$$.
I'd wager that I'd be able to predict which of the two will be which.
Measurements are an important R'n'D and debugging tool for the audio gear designer, and above a certain threshold numbers
do count. But all of the gear you're looking at aren't some cheap chinesium knock-offs, all the stuff you're shopping for is already far below that threshold to begin with. At that level of gear quality, numbers just won't help you predict anything meaningful about whether or not a piece of gear will sound good or not.
I wish it would, because it would make shopping for and comparing gear
sooooooo much more easy. But that's just not how it works.
I'm quite interested to see how that rack turns out, as well as the ladder you build to get to the top shelf.
I was thinking the same thing.
If someone here has Tyr paired with their Magnepan 1.7i I would love to hear your impressions.
Seconded.
Here's the thing, though: With Tyr driving them, my Q950s actually do come really close to sounding as clear and defined as Maggies do, but with more bass.
I've had my eyes on a pair of 1.7i or 3.7i because I'm completely and utterly in love with how they sound. But the way my living room works, there's just not the room I need to let them breath the way those Maggies require it. So I was as shocked as the next guy to discover that these Tyrs ended up getting me so close to my desired sound signature, and completely by accident, too!
I still very much wonder what 1.7s or 3.7s would sound like with Tyr driving them. Would their bass response benefit? I'm almost sure they would! But would Tyr's clarity be
too much for the Maggies, would that push them into pins-and-needles territory? I don't know!
When do we expect the transport to drop?
When it's done…?
I ordered the Tyrs because I want better amps, not louder amps. Just because one has speakers with high sensitivity (although Klipsch cheats with their numbers), it does not make Tyr obsolete.
Absolutely correct.
And actually, in response to the person you quoted, they aren't louder. That's not how "wattage" works. A speaker's efficiency is what determines whether 10 o'clock on your pre-amp sounds louder with one set or the other. As long as you keep the same speakers, 10 o'clock on your pre-amp will preeeeeeetty much be the same volume with Vidar, Aegir, or Tyr.
Where Tyr's wattage comes into play is that you can turn your volume knob up higher and get more volume
without losing definition in what you hear. More wattage means that your amp will be able to move more air without running out of steam. So, pretty much all amps will get loud, but only some of them will still sound good. (Not clip or distort, etc.)
(I'm obviously grossly oversimplifying here, ignoring things like gain, etc. – but I think my point remains valid.)
