Schiit Audio Valhalla

[admin_exported]

Just received these in the mail. After about 2 days of burning in, these sound awesome!!!

Made in the US, great quality, only $350.

www.schiit.com

I know sound like an advert, but these guys are awesome.

 

[Big Chris]

Is the Valhalla worth the extra $100 over the Asgard in your opinion?

 

[Anonymous]

SoundStage: Asgards are better.

Smooth, Lush sound: Valhalla are better.

With the Sennheiser 650s I like the Valhalla better.

 

[Anonymous]

Really depends on the headphones you're driving. For the Grados that I have, I would say no. For the sennheisers, possibly yes to surely (I'll post more once I've had more of a chance to listen to these).

The Schiit folks recommend the Valhalla with 'high' impedence headphones, but also the AKG which are 62 ohm headphones. The Asgard are 'better' at driving low impedence headphones and gel specially well with grados and all sennheisers (even the 300 ohm HD 650).

I find them both excellent. I'll probably end up keeping both. The Asgard for work, and the Valhalla for home.

 

[idc]

Really depends on the headphones you're driving. For the Grados that I have, I would say no. For the sennheisers, possibly yes to surely (I'll post more once I've had more of a chance to listen to these).

The Schiit folks recommend the Valhalla with 'high' impedence headphones, but also the AKG which are 62 ohm headphones. The Asgard are 'better' at driving low impedence headphones and gel specially well with grados and all sennheisers (even the 300 ohm HD 650).

I find them both excellent. I'll probably end up keeping both. The Asgard for work, and the Valhalla for home.

Anything less than 32 ohms now a days is likely to be for an ipod or similar and IEMs, which are over amped by many a full sized headphone amp. My MF X-CANV8P will happily drive headphones from 5 to 10,000 ohms. You have to be careful with the volume for the lower ohmed cans.

 

[Anonymous]

Ah, but then there is the Schiit Lyr. With 6 watts of output. Headphone amp that can power smaller speakers. 🙂

 

[Olli1324]

But what is the noise trade off for 6 Watts of power? Studying the datasheet for opamps shows massive decreases in performance once you go beyond a certain output voltage. The Lyr goes well beyond this and is that is show by the 0.1% distortion specification, which is.... not exactly good.

 

[Anonymous]

Don't know. Haven't tried them myself.

Since you're supposed to use these with high impedence headphones, low sensitivity headphones, I suspect the distortation shouldn't matter.

Shoot an email to Jason @ schiit audio. He might have more info for you.

 

[Olli1324]

Just seems like they designed the amp to meet a marketing goal at the expense of sound quality. I haven't heard it myself, so if it does sound amazing then fair enough, I just don't appreciate their approach, I suppose.