What a crazy Hobby this is. I haven’t had the pleasure of owning or hearing Schiit gear. I have read about the history of their company, products, concepts of how they bring products to market. Their model of using their technical expertise and experience to create products at more affordable prices while uniquely listening to their customer base, the customers being allowed to drive models / production while being made in the USA. What about any of the above isn’t to like, weather you like the way their products sounds is subjective.
The magic in this Hobby is that gear isn’t merely the sum of its parts. A company can have a ton of R&D funding, put out products that have the best specs on paper but be bested by a one man shop who has a passion and talent to creatively implement those same parts differently, yielding different sonic results. But that “besting” is purely in the ear of the beholder.
This hobby has so many success stories of passionate boutique shops making everything from speakers to DAC’s to Amps, to cables, to designing next level active speaker systems. It also has mainstay house hold names like Mac, Krell, Luxman, the list goes on. These iconic brands have their own large fan clubs.
So much depends on “you” what you think sounds good. Some of the most heralded products are born from the marriage of highly engineered products that were tweaked, changed in ways that don’t necessarily make sense on paper but yield sonic bliss.
Like their products or not, if you are into this Hobby Schiit’s model, success should be celebrated, admired. Taking a Schiit on the company highlights the elitism, baloney that pushes people away from the hobby. I hope we continue to see Companies like Schiit thrive and BTW, some of the other brands, products referenced in this thread are small, 1-2 man operations trying to replicate Schiit’s model / success.