Quick product question: I’ve been looking at upgrades over my Asgard 3 (just kicking tires at the moment) and I was wondering: any Asgard 3 owners who also have Lyr+…which one runs hotter? People say Asgard 3 runs hot but I feel more like it’s warm to the touch. Alsooooo, is the upgrade worth it from a price to performance standpoint (subjectively I mean for the sound not measurements)
I powered them both on about an hour ago, and when I put my hand on top of the top cover, the temperatures seem similar to me. I have them in different rooms on different floors of the house, so I can't move my hand back and forth within a few seconds, though. The Lyr+ has a vacuum tube sticking out the top, and that definitely feels warmer than the top cover, but I can wrap my whole hand around the tube and it's definitely cool enough to keep holding it indefinitely. A stainless steel pitcher for steaming milk with an espresso machine, for example, gets
much hotter than the tube does, and the tube is the hottest surface I can find on the Lyr+. I won't be surprised if an infrared thermometer can pick out a difference in temperature, but from a human hands-on perspective I can't say there's a major difference.
I upgraded from an Asgard 3 to a Lyr+ about a year and a half ago with the first run of Lyr+ amps. My opinion is that Lyr+ is a worthwhile upgrade over Asgard 3 in that it adds a tube mode, while offering a solid state mode that sounds similar to me, and the Lyr+ volume control and features are better for me. The solid state mode sounds very similar, to me at least, with the low-impedance dynamics and planars that I normally use with it. The tube mode is its own thing, and my Lyr+ is set to tube mode more than 95% of the time. I use the Lyr+ with a Psvane CV181-T, which I think sounds great with all the headphones I use. To me, the Asgard 3 is very clean, but the Lyr+ tube mode just sounds a bit richer and more interesting. The factory Tung-Sol tube I received was also good, but I haven't spent much time listening with it. I've never used the preamp function of the Lyr+, because my headphone system also uses a Saga S as a preamp, which is connected to some powered monitors and some other headphone amps through splitters.
Gain switching is
much faster with Asgard 3 (instant) than with Lyr+ (~5 seconds), and switching between tube and solid state modes is comparatively slow (~20 seconds), if that matters to you. Input switching is still instantaneous. Personally, I don't think I would bother upgrading unless you're sure you want to use the tube mode a lot, and there are much cheaper ways of finding out whether you like tube hybrids, like the Vali series. While there's nothing wrong at all with the Lyr+ solid state mode, I don't think it's worth the price difference unless you want both the tube and solid state capabilities, or unless you really want a lot more power. For me, the Lyr+ solid state capability is a convenience feature for the scenario where I don't have a working tube handy.
I don't own any headphones that the Lyr+ can't power to dangerous volumes. The most demanding headphones I have are Aeon 2 closed and DT880 Edition, and I've never turned up past 3 o'clock with either of them, which was already alarmingly loud. I know neither of those is an especially demanding headphone in terms of power, but it's what I have. The TH610s and Grados I run only on low gain because of the noise floor. The stepped attenuator is still audibly perfect for these in terms of channel matching, but I can really hear the noise with the Lyr+ set to high gain mode. In low gain mode I hear nothing but the input signal.
In my system, I also have a Valhalla (1) and an SW51+ (transformer-coupled 6Ж51P) in addition to the Lyr+. I like both of those for use with some headphones, but they simply can't run the Grados, or the Aeon 2, or the Arya Stealth properly in my opinion, and the Lyr+ is fantastic for those. For high-impedance dynamics like HD650 and DT880, all these amps work well in different ways, with the Lyr+ sounding the cleanest (which is not always what you want, right? But sometimes).
In my opinion, the low gain mode of Lyr+ is not clean enough for Andromedas, while the low gain mode of Asgard 3 is clean enough. With Andromedas, I can easily hear the Lyr+ noise floor, but I can get an appropriate volume from Asgard 3 without hearing it. I think the negative gain mode of Magni+ is a significantly better choice for the Andromedas, but that's a mode that was specifically designed for very sensitive IEMs. These are the only set I have that are too sensitive for the Lyr+ in low gain mode, and all of my other IEMs are perfectly fine with it, but the Andromedas are a famously brutal test for amplifier SNR. I don't think I would make a decision about Lyr+ solely based on performance with Andromedas.
If you use the card slot in the Asgard 3, of course, you'll have to replace that with an outboard DAC. I've only used the Asgard 3 and Lyr+ with Bifrost 2 and Modi 3+, and I'm afraid I've never heard any Schiit DAC with TI or ESS D/A chips in it so I can't say anything about the stuff that's currently available.