Hey all,
Just a quick post to let you know that I haven't forgotten about you--it's just been grueling getting up to the show, then very busy during the show. I'll be posting a chapter on the preamps in the next day or so, but before that, I just thought I'd let you know how the show went.
First, the preamps. We used both Saga and Freya at varying times in the listening room, together with either one or two Vidars. We also varied the source from a Yggdrasil to the Bifrost Multibit. At the same time, we played both the Salk Song3s and the SoundScape 8s at various times. So, depending on when you visited, you may have heard a $4700-ish dollar system (Saga, one Vidar, Bifrost Multibit, Song3s) to a $15,000-ish system (Yggy, Freya, 2 Vidars, and the SoundScape 8s, which are $9K a pair. To my admittedly biased ears, everything sounded great, right down to the "minimal" SE system.
The show was the first major outing for the Vidar, which is still a late-generation prototype. It had very little time at the shop before hitting the show. Despite that, it played with only a single hitch: one of the amps thermally shut off from time to time when we were running it as a mono amp into the 4-ohm SoundScape 8s. This amp didn't have the heat tunnel bolted to the top and bottom of the chassis, due to fit issues, so it had less radiating area than the other prototype (the entire chassis is aluminum, and yes, bolting the heat tunnel to the case is important for maximum dissipation.) As an interesting side-effect of the heat tunnel design, you can see entirely through the amp, like a donut. The good news about the amp shutting down means that the protection is working, on first-generation firmware.
Some more notes on protection, firmware, biasing, and such:
1. You are likely to run into protection if you're running these amps mono into 4 ohm speakers at high levels, especially those that dip down far below 2 ohms at points. That shouldn't be surprising at this size and cost (and given the fact that we are rating it into 8 ohms only in mono mode.) What happens when the amplifier hits protection is that it will disconnect the load.
2. The amp still needs to go through some pretty extensive torture-testing to see where the protection system fails. This has to be 100% right. Unreliable cheap amps kill companies.
3. Anyone who carps about "ah, waaaahhh, you can't measure a Schiit intelligently managed amp," is making some wrong assumptions. Consider this V2.0 of the Intelligent Amp Operating System.
And yes, Vidar is a single-ended current-feedback type of amplifier, 100% bipolar and 100% complementary from input to output, with constant feedback across the audio band and exotic 2SC/2SA parts used throughout. If this sounds familiar, it's because Jotunheim led us down the path to current feedback.
In terms of timing, you'll be seeing the preamps up on the site in a couple of weeks (they are being sent to photograph straight from the show, and we're just waiting on production of the boards, as we have all metal in-house.) Vidar is more fluid, as it has some long-lead parts that will certainly put it out past the end of the year.
In terms of why we're announcing this before you can buy it, well...the gears have been turning for some time, and we were sooooooo close on the preamps, and I still know I'll kick myself in the ass on the amp, so hey, maybe we're just dumb.
All the best,
Jason
