Under $168.96 and with high-end cred?
Schiit Audio’s Magni is the headphone amp to buy if you’re watching the
pennies. And it’s made in the USA...
You can stop laughing now. Or maybe not.
The joke has not worn off, and Schiit is managing to live with a name that they
probably devised after one too many Dirty Martinis: emphasis on the ‘dirty’.
The products themselves benefit from Scandinavian nomenclature – Asgard,
Bifrost, et al– so, should this stunning little Magni headphone amplifier tempt
you, you needn’t approach the salesman with the embarrassing request, ‘Do you
stock Schiit?’
Not
an IC audio op-amp in sight – the Magni employs all discrete circuitry with a
low-noise JFET input, a fast (voltage) preamp stage and substantial output
power transistors
The thing is, if you throw enough fancy components
at the problem, and follow basic sound design practice, you’re likely to get a
reasonable result. But work on something that requires component costs of
one-tenth of that flagship silver disc spinner, and you’re into a new world of pain.
It’s where real skill comes in, and not everyone has it. Even though standards have
recently risen, you need only listen to the average entry-level compact disc
player to realise that the ability to make great products at this end of the
market remains in short supply.
Front
face of the all-steel Magni just has a rotary gain control and ¼in headphone
socket, plus ‘on’ LED. The unit is powered from an AC wall wart plug
What the absurd name did do is call attention
to a brand found at hi-fi shows in huge halls filled with hundreds of
likeminded souls. Headphones and the natural adjunct – the amplifiers needed to
drive them with more finesse than a weedy socket offered by tablet or
smartphone – have been grouped as a separate genre for a few years, and Schiit
Audio must compete with the rest in a field that still has a ‘Wild West’ feel
to it.
As its founders are seasoned designers of,
and I quote, ‘fully balanced differential power amplifiers, fully discrete I/V conversion
stages, audiophile D/A converters, relay-switched stepped attenuator volume
controls in preamps, etc,’ they could have launched Schiit with whatever they
liked. Being savvy, they chose headphone amps, though they also make DACs and
we’re promised that other two-channel products will follow.
Catering for today
Schiit recognises that the traditional audiophile
path of table radio to console to separates is long gone. ‘Today, nobody starts
with a table radio. Everyone… starts with an iPod and headphones screwed into their
ears. Headphones are now the standard.’ This is blunt, but honest and right on
target. These guys know their Schiit.
Rear
panel is basic, with just one pair of RCA phonos for the stereo input signal,
on-off switch and 16V power socket. Casework is two-tone with good finish
Acknowledging, too, that many newbies soon reach
the limits of earbuds, tablet, iPod and computer performance, they asked, what do
they do if they don’t possess the gene or the budget that aspires to $33,792.15
wires and $10,137.65 cartridges? The simplest, most obvious move is to a
headphone amplifier, something we as audiophiles would deduce immediately, but
which is not part of the conditioning of, say, a 17-year-old who’s never known
life in front of a pair of speakers.
Schiit works with ‘simple, discrete circuit
topologies’ for the analogue sections, while ‘innovative bit-perfect management
systems’ are employed ‘on the digital side to avoid asynchronous sample rate conversion’.
It also uses Class A designs ‘where practical and single gain stages when possible’.
It eschews op-amps, integrated or discrete, except as DC servos, or in the
Modi: the least-expensive DAC. Both Mike Moffat and Jason Stoddard are lab rats
comfortable with two Stanford Research SR1 audio analyzers, ‘one kitted out
with their ultra-low-jitter reference and analysis tools’. Both are
unreconstructed audiophiles, so they undertake listening tests with a wide
variety of popular headphones.
Despite being built down to a price, the
company’s entry-level headphone amp, the $167.27 Magni, is far from Schiit-y.
Its build quality, fit and finish do not suggest cost-cutting, and the two
controls – the rear-panel on/off toggle and the front panel rotary – feel solid
and encouraging. Schiit wants its equipment to be ‘something you can pass down
to your children’. And would you believe that the Magni is made in the USA… not
China (wall wart excepted)?
This is budget esoterica at its most blissfully
simple, inexpensive and compact; it weighs a reassuring 0.45kg. Editor Miller explained
that he’s been devising accurate tests for measuring headphone amplifier output:
Schiit claims that the Magni delivers 1.2W/32ohm [see PM’s lab Report]. It
certainly drove the new Focal Spirit Classic, which barely made a peep with the
feed from an iPod. Ironically, this suits the sort of headphones that one might
not expect to be partnered with a $167.27 amp: I also gave it a whirl with a
grand’s worth of AKG K812s and it was a delight.
This baby runs warm, but it’s suitably ventilated
and never caused any worries. A regulated 16V wall wart AC transformer feeds
the Magni, and its back accepts line signals via phonos. At the front is the ¼in
socket, inviting you to use ‘real’ cans, which are driven by a discrete gain
stage design – not IC op-amps – with ‘fast VAS transistors and massive output
power transistors’. Schiit also uses a DC servo to eliminate coupling
capacitors from the output, operation being Class A/B and DC-coupled throughout.
