[rkw]

Also meant, if there's any way a priori to know whether to use the Aegir mono vs bi-amped for "best"/clearest sound?

Don't know, but there seems to be a lot of discussion about it.
https://www.google.com/search?q=bridged+mono+vs+bi-amped
You also have to consider vertical vs horizontal bi-amp.

 

[Plautus001]

Yeah, meant bi-amped.

Also meant, if there's any way a priori to know whether to use the Aegir mono vs bi-amped for "best"/clearest sound?

In my experience stereo amps usually sound best in stereo... going mono provides more power, but the amp works harder.

Biamping also bypasses part of the crossover which sometimes "opens things up".

 

[rollinbr]

Flew up to Colorado on Saturday from Phoenix to visit my brother, and help support his family, who has been in the ICU since having surgery on the 22nd of April. They do have him scheduled to be moved out of ICU once a bed opens up on one of the other floors. Will still be needing some physical therapy rehab once he's released but things are trending in the right direction. Will be returning back to Arizona on Tuesday afternoon.

I did pack the Bifrost 2 and Liquid Carbon in my carry on suitcase. Stealth and cables were in the backpack. It's been nice to be able to relax in the evenings and unwind.

Ambar Lucid - Get Lost In The Music (Official Video)
Flight of the Cosmic Hippo
Pink Floyd - " PULSE " Live 1994 Remastered

 

[Plautus001]

Flew up to Colorado on Saturday from Phoenix to visit my brother, and help support his family, who has been in the ICU since having surgery on the 22nd of April. They do have him scheduled to be moved out of ICU once a bed opens up on one of the other floors. Will still be needing some physical therapy rehab once he's released but things are trending in the right direction. Will be returning back to Arizona on Tuesday afternoon.

I did pack the Bifrost 2 and Liquid Carbon in my carry on suitcase. Stealth and cables were in the backpack. It's been nice to be able to relax in the evenings and unwind.



Ambar Lucid - Get Lost In The Music (Official Video)
Flight of the Cosmic Hippo
Pink Floyd - " PULSE " Live 1994 Remastered

Best wishes for your brother ❤

 

[wout31]

I'm pretty sure they're coming out of China, but yeah, those prices are very tempting. I've seen a few kits around as well and hesitated because of the price, but now, why not?

Those prices are "impossible"
Nowhere on the site it reads the Nixie tubes are included. So they are not.
I guess what you get for the prices mentioned is an empty box that can hold Nixie tubes that you have to buy separately.
Even in China any single Nixie tube is $ 20- $ 40+ each

 

[CJG888]

I remember those in cash registers back in the UK in the mid-70s…

 

[JohnnyCanuck]

Michael Fremer's review of Mani 2:

"If the audio industry handed out awards, the winner for “The most improved analog product of the decade” would be Schiit’s Mani 2 MM/MC phono preamplifier."

https://www.analogplanet.com/conten...-preamp-goes-head-budget-phono-preamp-class-0

JC

 

[Paladin79]

Those prices are "impossible"
Nowhere on the site it reads the Nixie tubes are included. So they are not.
I guess what you get for the prices mentioned is an empty box that can hold Nixie tubes that you have to buy separately.
Even in China any single Nixie tube is $ 20- $ 40+ each

"This Vintage Nixie Tube Clock is handcrafted using new old stock tubes. These Nixie tubes are at least 30 years old, have never been used before and come from old military stock. Old school technology combined with an art deco style and handmade enclosure."

I used to see plenty of nixie tubes out of Russia for low prices, most all the ads are gone now of course. Here are some used ones as an example.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/1834970958...5%2BhfjsuprHsZwc5fvD|ampid:PL_CLK|clp:2047675

 

[StimpyWan]

Michael Fremer's review of Mani 2:

"If the audio industry handed out awards, the winner for “The most improved analog product of the decade” would be Schiit’s Mani 2 MM/MC phono preamplifier."

https://www.analogplanet.com/conten...-preamp-goes-head-budget-phono-preamp-class-0

JC

A good review. Thanks...!

 

[macdonjh]

As a former car audio shop owner and IASCA competitor I can confirm that car audio is the land of fear, witchcraft, and superstition. Abandon all hope ye who enter therein.

So, back again to the witchcraft department: I've been living with what sounded to me like a grounding problem for several months because I didn't want to take my trunk apart to figure it out. Of the eight drivers in my car, it affected only one. It didn't get louder or quieter when I turned the volume knob, but it did change volume and pitch somewhat when I stepped on the gas. It was also somewhat tolerable because road noise masked it. Yesterday I finally did the gymnastics required to lay face-up in my trunk, several times, and swap interconnects, speaker leads, etc. to confirm a bad amp channel was not the culprit. Next step was taking out a couple of trunk finishers to get access to the second of two DSP units (the first applies correction to return the signal from the head unit to a flat curve, as verified by nobody for my install ). Before I started swapping RCAs here, on a lark, I disconnected the +12V, ground and 12V trigger leads and the reconnected them. Even before I disconnected them I tugged on them and they were secure. Now they're secure-er, right?

Whatever, noise is gone and I'm happy-er...

At least that kind of schiit doesn't happen inside with my head phone gear. Wasn't there a request a few pages back for @Jason Stoddard to make some mobile audio stuff? Wouldn't have to be brushed aluminum, even @bcowen would buy C8 blue if he could put it in the trunk.

 

[JWMAstro]

Chapter 26:
Finally, the $99 Solution

Back in the early 1990s, while I was working at Sumo, if you told me I’d eventually be designing and selling audio products that retailed for $99, I would have told you that you were insane.

(And, if you’d told me that I’d be designing and selling audio products that retailed for $63—the 1991 equivalent to $99 today), I’d think you were even nuttier.

I suspect Mike Moffat would have had the same response. Which makes it all the crazier that he was the one who brought the idea for the $99 DAC to me first, and started the whole inexpensive-gear thing at Schiit.

Why would this be so unbelievable, you ask?

It’s simple. Back then, it was a different world. Building and selling a product for $31-37 in 1991 (which would allow the dealers to have their cut, in the dealer-dominant marketplace of the time) simply wasn’t gonna happen. Selling direct was, to put it mildly, unfeasible in the pre-internet world. And, back then, we’d probably have to make the products with thru-hole parts, rather than using surface-mount parts (which allow for efficient automated assembly), driving the production cost even higher.

And, early on in the Magni/Modi project, I had doubts that we could do it for $99, even direct.

So I was very, very thrilled when the original numbers came in for the chassis and wall-wart, confirming that we could, indeed, sell gear with the near-unbelievable two-digit price tag.

Once the numbers were confirmed—this was in late August 2012—we started placing the biggest orders we’d ever done to date with our suppliers. We knew Magni and Modi would be big, and we knew how crazy things could get if we went out of stock. So we stocked up, in anticipation of being able to release it at CanJam, well-timed for the holiday rush that hits every year.*

*Audio is a strongly seasonal business. October through March are hot. April, May, and June see falling sales, to a low in July/August. Then it picks back up again as people get into a stay-indoors or holiday-buying mood. This seasonality tracks very well with cold weather in much of the northern hemisphere, where people are more likely to stay at home and curl up with a nice glass of scotch…er, I mean wine…er, wait, warm milk or something is probably a little more PC, but whatever. As the days get warmer and vacation season hits, sales fall. This has been going on approximately since the earth cooled. If you’re thinking of starting your own business, be aware if it’s a seasonal one or not—planning in the fast season can leave you buried in unsold stock, and projecting forward from the slow season can put you in heavy backorder.

Of course, people who attended 2012 CanJam know there was no Magni and Modi there (well, not out on the table—there were under-the-table prototypes we shared with a few people.)

And, even more sharp-memoried readers will remember that Magni and Modi didn’t ship “comfortably before the holiday season,” and, in actuality, made their appearance on December 13—deep into the Christmas buying time.

Not ideal, right?

Yep. But much less ideal than setting an arbitrary deadline to be missed, or pushing a semi-finished product out the door.


The Luxury (and Penalty) of Closed Doors

Magni and Modi were the first products we didn’t announce beforehand. Indeed, they were the first products we didn’t even hint about. This “closed door” approach is great in many ways. Namely:

1. There’s no chance of missing the deadline, because there isn’t any
2. If there are problems in production, you have the luxury to take your time and sort them out
3. Your competitors don’t know what you’re doing until you launch, which means it will take them longer to counter

Of course, closed doors have some disadvantages, too:

1. With no deadline, you may not work as hard as you need to in order to hold a schedule
2. If you have cash flow problems—that is, if you’re running a business on a receivables-financing basis, or a assets-financing basis, or if you don’t have shipping products to tide you over—the luxury of time is a cold comfort
3. If there are significant delays, you may miss your first-mover advantage

The real danger to Schiit’s launch of the Magni and Modi was the first point—with no deadline, you might not work as hard to get it out on time.

Now, this doesn’t mean we sat around. But when metal was late, and when the board house was slow freeing up their surface mount line for us, we were probably less diligent than we should have been in being “in their face.”**

**Please note that “in their face” does not mean “being a total whiny bitchy ass at every opportunity.” Running a business that doesn’t do everything in-house requires great relationships with your vendors. They need to know when things aren’t critical, and they need to know that you’re not going to hold them to some insane algorithmic standard for to-the-minute delivery on every product. That means, when you do need fast delivery, or a quick change, they’re going to be much, much more likely to get that done for you. Because you don’t ride them on every little thing. So, “in their face,” means “calling them more than once every three weeks to see how things are going.”

So yeah, metal was a bit late. That killed showing Magni and Modi at CanJam. And boards were a little later. Which wouldn’t have been as big a problem, except for two others:

• The pots (engineer-speak for ‘volume control’) we planned to use were late—even later than their 6-week lead time would suggest. Which hung up delivery of the boards, since a headphone amp without volume control is, well, pretty much useless. Especially when there’s a big hole in the chassis it was supposed to poke through.
• When we finally got the completed boards in, we had an engineering “oh schiit” moment when we realized the boards couldn’t be inserted into the chassis. As in, at all. The big capacitors at the front of the board hung up between the pressed-in board standoff and the top inner chassis flange.

Aside: and, before you start saying, “3D CAD would have showed this clear as day,” well, not really—not unless it showed articulating exploded views. And, these days, finally, everything we’re doing is 3D—but not back then.

So, what did we do? Well, I knew at least one fix:

“We could send the chassis back to the metal guys and have them notch the front flange to clear the standoff.”

Mike was less than convinced. “How long will that take?”

“A couple of weeks.”

Mike looked pointedly up at the calendar. It was the first week of December.

“Yeah, I know, I know, we miss Christmas…”

“If it’s really only two weeks,” Mike said. “We could lay the capacitors down, couldn’t we?”

“Yeah, but that looks awful.” But then, I had an epiphany—the one I should have had in the first place. “But we can find shorter capacitors, I bet.”

Aside: yeah, I know, obvious. But tell me you’ve never made any boneheaded mistakes. With a straight face.

“Can you get capacitors with the same value?” Mike asked.

“I’ll find out. But even if we have to shrink the values a bit, it’s pretty overkill already.”

A quick Mouser search confirmed that we could, indeed, get the same value capacitors, at about half the height. Mocking it up with capacitors of that size proved that we could, indeed, just clear the chassis flange. Done.

Now, the above thing about capacitors of different sizes may seem strange to non-engineers, but it really isn’t. Capacitors of the same value—for the sake of argument, let’s say 1000uF at 16V—come in a huge array of sizes. Some are large for the sake of higher temperature ratings or lower ESR. Some are large because a lot of engineers think that large caps measure better than small caps. That’s not always true, because a lot of manufacturers caught on to this little factoid, and sometimes make electrolytic capacitors that are full of a whole lot of air. You need to look at the specs, and make your decision based on that…and also consider that oddball sizes are the ones more frequently out of stock, and pricier.

So, after the capacitor debacle was resolved, we got some right-size caps in next day, and sent the first article boards back to the PCB house. Luckily, there were only 10 first articles that needed reworked. The rest of them came to us with the new caps in-place.

And, in a few days, we had enough Magnis and Modis on the shelf to announce…


The Real Statement

On December 13, 2012, we announced Modi and Magni to the world. And, oh, what a crazy announcement that was—and a crazy last two weeks of December!

In terms of mechanics, it was a relatively uneventful launch. We had product in stock. We had enough labor to keep it in stock, and a big enough first run that we didn’t hit backorder until January.

In terms of issues, it was also relatively uneventful. Some dead wall-warts (which we tightened up by better vendor communication) and some out-of-spec pots with unacceptable tracking, even at relatively high levels (which we reworked, and re-spec’d the pots for the next run.)

But in terms of what it did to the company…suddenly we were all about $99 products. They were the vast majority of sales—easily outstripping all other products combined. We struggled to keep up with shipping and with inquiries, which led to fast changes on the shipping side and slower changes on the customer service side (until November 2013, I answered the vast majority of customer service questions.)

And, to this day, the best comment I think we ever got on the launch was amongst the chatter about the Schiit statement products (yeah, people were talking about them even back then, the as-yet-unnamed Ragnarok and Yggdrasil.)

The comment was:

“Now, this is the real statement.”

Exactly. Thank you. Making another pricey product—no matter how advanced and innovative—is cool and all, and makes for good ego fodder (that is, at least when you can ship the darn things.) But making a good, solid product that almost anyone can afford, that’s a whole ‘nother thing entirely. It’s wayyyy more important for the Magni and Modi to exist than Ragnarok and Yggdrasil.

And—you know what? It’s a lot more fun, too. Magni and Modi will always be special to me, because it proved that we could actually make, sell, and support a no-compromises, all-discrete amp, and a top-shelf asynchronous DAC in the USA for a two-figure price tag.

Nobody was expecting that.

Nobody was expecting that from us.

Magni and Modi were the first products that actually made me want to go to CES and do a press tour. To go in front of them and say, “You know, there once was a time in this country when we actually made things. Practical things, with top-notch technology and affordable price tags. Things without excuses about ‘well, we can’t really do that in a global economy,’ or ‘we don’t have the supply chain here to do that,’ or ‘labor here costs so much we can’t be competitive.’” And then hold up Magni and Modi and continue: “That stops today. Presenting the only fully discrete, no-excuses headphone amp made in the USA, from predominantly-US-sourced parts, with a 2 year warranty. No excuses. $99.”

You know, that would make a decent commercial, if Fiat-owned Chrysler hadn’t co-opted the idea. Ah well, what can you do?

And, it’s funny. After the launch, of course we got compared to the O2 and ODAC. And some people even opined that we brought these products out as a direct counter to those.

Actually, no. I was thinking bigger. I saw the headphone market growing. And I realized that, very soon, some large entity would wake up and say, “Hey, you know, we should have some of the accessories side of that. Like amps and DACs.” Someone like Logitech. Someone like Harman. Someone big.

And, with a market fragmented amongst a bunch of smaller players, you know what? It could have happened. They could have gotten some engineers together, put together some of TI’s textbook op-amp/headphone-driver solutions, built the whole thing in China, and sold it for a very attractive price. Maybe not $99 through distribution, but dang close.

But after Magni and Modi? A powerful, fully-discrete US-built amp for $99? A USB 2 asynchronous DAC for $99? Well, then suddenly the market doesn’t look so attractive. Going up against that is a lot harder than going up against Asgard, Valhalla, and Lyr.

And that’s what I wanted to do—to set the value bar, and the barrier to entry, much, much higher. So that any of the big guys out there looking in would say, “Hmm, well, there’s some very high-value, well-marketed stuff already established—considering the size of the market, let’s take a flyer.”

Hopefully, we have achieved a small fraction of that goal.

We’ll see.


The Lasting Impact

At launch, I really was all about making an impact—but it took quite a while for me to realize what it really is. Chest-thumping about made-in-USA product is one thing. Setting the barrier to entry high is another. But the former doesn’t really matter for much of the world, and the latter really doesn’t matter much except to us and the competition.

No. The thing that really matters is that Magni and Modi are giving many, many first-timers their initial taste of very good sound. They’re recommended here, and on many other online communities, including the biggest first-timer venue out there: Reddit.

It’s become almost a knee-jerk recommendation: “Oh, you’re looking at getting into headphone amps and DACs? Well, there’s the Magni/Modi…” (and others, of course), but Magni and Modi are usually amongst the first mentioned.

Why? Because they’re inexpensive, and because they’re good products.

I wasn’t kidding when I wrote, “They may be the only amp and DAC you’ll ever need.” I was dead serious. Magni has a ton of power, and it’s pretty open and neutral for many different headphones. It’s easy to recommend. Same with Modi. It plugs into a whole lot of different sources, doesn’t need drivers, and pretty much just works. Again, easy.

Sure, there are amps and DACs out there that scale up higher, or have more features, or serve the format du jour, or whatever, but for most people in today’s largely 16/44.1 based world (and, dare we say it, AAC and MP3), they’re just fine. And either can be had for the price of a good steak dinner.

So that’s the real impact: bringing that first audiophile experience to a larger audience.

And that matters.

It is fantastic to havethis view of the thinking behind Magni and Modi. It is a great thing to enable participation in a community like good sound by virtually anyone. That has often been done via used equipment but with headphones the same can be done with new equipment that many (like my wife) find more attractive. Many thanks!

 

[JWMAstro]

Re-reading this chapter, I am even more impressed. Many US endeavours, from manufacturing to economics, have been through the faster+better+cheaper phase ( where faster is the engineering or the science) and we see clearly that one normally only gets two of the three, so choice is critical. Schiit clearly chose better + cheaper and then put in the thought and engineering/planning work (smarts + sweat equity) to make it happen. We are the beneficiaries!

 

[JWMAstro]

Portable amps/DACs make sense, but I really hope they're not going into portable audiophile music players. They require insane costs and complexity in hardware, software, and services to be very good, yet they have about as much of a future (and present) as Android watches — and these guys are smart enough to see that.

A few thousand people's responses to as-yet-unmet promises on Kickstarter do not reflect the market's response to an actual shipping product.

Competing with the smartphone is always unwise, but especially so when competing in an area — music storage, acquisition, and portable playback — that it's really good at. (And don't forget that a custom hardware player almost certainly couldn't support streaming services in any usable way, which is how most people listen to music these days, like it or not.)

I generally agree, but a portable DAC or amp designed by someone who really cares makes sense. A battery is a perfectly quiet power source and the enforced economy of power consumption is often not a bad thing. This is a great complement to the smartphone and does what the smartphone is not good at: quality sound with a variety of headphones. Smartphone designers don't have the motivation or interest to supply that internally.

 

[JWMAstro]

Definitely.

A modern DAP is mostly a software project. Fewer things in our life need software, not more. I hate when perfectly good devices get junked up by bad software. I hate software. And I'm a software developer. I can't even imagine what the hardware guys think of it.

As a hardware guy, I fully agree. I prefer firmware almost every time. Really much more efficient and elegant.

 

[Ableza]

So, back again to the witchcraft department: I've been living with what sounded to me like a grounding problem for several months because I didn't want to take my trunk apart to figure it out. Of the eight drivers in my car, it affected only one. It didn't get louder or quieter when I turned the volume knob, but it did change volume and pitch somewhat when I stepped on the gas. It was also somewhat tolerable because road noise masked it. Yesterday I finally did the gymnastics required to lay face-up in my trunk, several times, and swap interconnects, speaker leads, etc. to confirm a bad amp channel was not the culprit. Next step was taking out a couple of trunk finishers to get access to the second of two DSP units (the first applies correction to return the signal from the head unit to a flat curve, as verified by nobody for my install ). Before I started swapping RCAs here, on a lark, I disconnected the +12V, ground and 12V trigger leads and the reconnected them. Even before I disconnected them I tugged on them and they were secure. Now they're secure-er, right?

Whatever, noise is gone and I'm happy-er...

At least that kind of schiit doesn't happen inside with my head phone gear. Wasn't there a request a few pages back for @Jason Stoddard to make some mobile audio stuff? Wouldn't have to be brushed aluminum, even @bcowen would buy C8 blue if he could put it in the trunk.

The sound you describe is called engine whine and is generally caused by a bad ground, or sometimes by a loose or stray speaker wire touching ground. When you re-made the power connections you fixed it, apparently.

This is part of the reason why an upgrade of "the big three" is common on larger car audio istallation. It helps prevent grounding issues and assures a more robust power connection to the alternator.

Here's an old post on my car audio forum describing the process: https://www.the12volt.com/installbay/forum_posts.asp?tid=73496