Oh Boy Schiit Announces 10 Tube Headphone Amp for $1799.00

I saw a picture of it but why does it need 10 tubes?  Are they more for show?

I guess this is why

“Folkvangr is completely bonkers,” Jason Stoddard, Schiit’s co-founder and head of analog development, said. “There’s no other way to put it. There’s no reason for a 10-tube amp that dissipates 100 watts at idle, to produce only about a watt or so at its best. It measures very badly, and it’s not what we’d use for any kind of IEM. But it’s the answer to a question that’s bugged me for years–what do tubes really sound like–and, at least to me, it sounds very good.”

This looks like an OTL design. You need to parallel enough tubes to get a low output impedance (the purpose of an output transformer in conventional tube designs).

Even on a good day, I'm far from a Schiit fanboy. But this is cool! It's a fairly novel offering in the market. 

OTL tube headphones amps have been around for ages, and its pain points have always been limited applicability (due to high output impedance) and the resultant sound quality's extreme dependence on choice of output capacitors - where extremely large capacitance values AND high voltage ratings are required for the role. Many simply resort to using electrolytic output caps due to cost and size considerations. 

Schiit seems to have satisfactorily addressed both of these points. 

Each tube increases chance for noise

Each tube increases chance for noise

With paralleled output tubes, this hardly matters. The SNR spec 90dB / 100dB is excellent. You won’t hear any noise unless you grossly mismatch this amp to an IEM. It would be a different story if this was a preamp using all the tubes to stack gain a mile high (most likely to be thrown away by the volume control).

Something like an ES Lab ES-R10 would be a good real-world test of noise floor audibility for this unit - 32 ohms, extremely sensitive (for a full size headphone), and a great sounding headphone with a price matching the amp. I expect it would be dead quiet. 

Wonder what it will cost to retube  with high quality NOS tubes?

Wonder what it will cost to retube  with high quality NOS tubes?

The eight 6N6p are still cheap, ~ $20 a tube, and the input pair can use a plethora of available new 61Np (also ~ $20 each) and new or vintage 6922 / 6DJ8. There are no rolling options for the 6N6p. So retube will cost $160 plus however much you want to drop on a nice pair of 6922 (which should last an extremely long time anyways).

Seems like a good choice of tubes for the job. 

Eight 6N6P tubes for $30 + shipping from Ukraine. Russian- made. Probably the same already in the Schiit!