Schiit amps, freya preamp

I have to take issue with the comments above, which is flat wrong.  Schiit makes fantastic amps and preamps.  The Vidar will drive anything in stereo mode, and plenty of people use two of them as mono blocks.  The Aegir was listed on Stereophile's A listing, which is a very exclusive award.  The Aegir, being 20 wpc,  is more suited for more efficient speakers and such, depending on whether you want rock concert levels or more reasonable uses.


The Freya+ is a major accomplishment for its sound quality.  Being that it also has tubes and passive modes and true balanced inputs/outputs basically turns the audio industry on its head.  Find any preamp that has this fully balanced circuitry, then look at the price.

The Vidar has MANY issues with going into protection when speakers run below 4 ohms. There are countless threads to back this up. The Aegir is a lower power, sort of class a but not really that can’t drive anything challenging.
Neither will power magneplanars well. This has also been well documented. If an amp manufacturer doesn’t want to tell you what topology it is - run. Run away and take your money with you.

As for preamps, the Freya has good specs but has a host of issues that spans all of its revisions. Thought it has improved many still find the chassis rings, also gets hot, loose single ended connections, supplied tubes are unusable, and the volume ticking sound, which is a “feature”. The Saga is a solid state preamp with a tube buffer. It seems to be ok for what it is and what it costs.

This post is utter nonsense and it's too bad that trollers still frequent this site.  The chassis doesn't ring, the connections are fine and the tubes are wonderful.  It does get hot after an hour in tube mode, but it's designed to run like this.  And again, Stereophile lists the Aegir on it's Class A listing, right along side of amps costing over 100K(look up that list and prove me wrong).  I wonder why they did that?  Maybe because it sounds so amazing. 

Also, yes the Freya+ is fully balanced, for those who have fully balanced sources like the Bifrost and on up in their dac line. 

Here's Stereophile's list of recommended amplifiers for the fall of 2019.  The first section of the list is the A rated class, and it's listed alphabetically.  You have to scroll down to the "S" section.

https://www.stereophile.com/content/recommended-components-2019-fall-edition-power-amps

I've never seen the Freya+ used for $350.  In fact, the reason they are not shipping preamps and some products is because they keep selling out their stock and are struggling to keep up with the strong demand.  They are in the midst of starting up a new facility in Texas(partly because running a business in California with its super high taxes and regulations is very challenging).  The Freya+ has been out of stock about half the time its been in existence because people snap it up as soon as it's in stock and it sells out again.

Gochurchgo, I am skeptical of your post.  You just now say that you've owned the Vidar and Freya, but only add this info on your third post in this thread, like an afterthought.  Then you declare that you have had tons of problems with them but don't actually name any specific issues.  It's just a strange way to describe one's experience.  Ditto on these Headfi threads, because headfi doesn't have any amplifier or preamplifier sections in their forum.

Why don't you put some links on these threads you talk about.  I just don't see it.

The Frey+ only has 3 sets of outputs(Ha!  Lots of pre's only have 1 set), and one of them is XLR.  So one of your devices has to have XLR inputs, or its no go as you thought.

You don't need to use the Freya+ for your headphone amp if you have a separate dac, but if you want to:  You could use a "Y" RCA cable on one of your Freya single ended outputs, that would give you 3 RCA outputs.

You'd need the correct type, male end on the single side and double female on the double side.  then just use regular RCA cables for each of your devices.

Alternatively you could get a balanced to RCA cable for the XLR outputs on the Freya, just again make sure you get the correct ends for what you need.  This output may be hotter, or higher in db, so watch for that.