Why is Schiit hated by ASMR and Reddit?

Discussion in 'General Audio Discussion' started by Stuff Jones, Sep 4, 2019.

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  1. Stuff Jones

    Stuff Jones Friend

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    Does anyone have any insight into why Schiit is so polarizing? On SBAF their products are fairly universally praised and widely recommended. On HF they're popular too.

    However on Reddit there are a lot of detractors and reports of Lyr 3s blowing up headphones and indifferent customer service. It's strange that Reddit would have so many detractors since they're all about budget fi. There's also website with a guy complaining about Schiit's indifferent customer service after his Asgard (?) blew up and how HF shushed his complaints. ASR (I know they are not respected here) dislikes them and not just their DACs. Their review of the Lyr 3 says it sounds no better than their Magni 3, which the author said caught fire.

    Is SBAF (and HF) really Schiit shills? Are the negative Reddit posters and ASR MOT tired of getting their ass kicked by Schiit? Is their gear actually more prone to catastrophic failure than other companies'? What accounts for the extreme polarization in views of Schiit products?

    I'm looking to assemble my first proper HP rig and Schiit's stuff looks like some of the best value, especially judging by SBAF. But the extremity of the negative views elsewhere gives me pause.
     
  2. Skyline

    Skyline Double-blindly done with this hobby

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    Brand loyalty, pissing contests, price nervosa...you name it. It's the same in every hobby. Go read posts about Nikon v Canon, Asics v Saucony, Apple v Andriod, etc.. People tie their identities into this stuff and take it all way too personally.

    I only worry about my own personal experience, which is that I've never had a piece of gear from them malfunction and I've never had issues with customer service in response to my questions.

    My shill radar comes on when a person thinks that every item Schiit makes sounds like the most amazing thing they've ever heard. Their products vary and have a lot of different sonic traits throughout the lineup...it only stands to reason that you'll like some of the products and dislike others.
     
    Last edited: Sep 4, 2019
  3. ultrabike

    ultrabike Measurbator - Admin

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    Schiit has a very diverse portafolio of products.

    As classical affordable options, Modi 3 and Magni 3 are well regarded across the board.

    However, as price goes higher and solutions become less classical, you are likely to get more pasionate opinions on all brands (Schiit included).
     
    Last edited: Sep 4, 2019
  4. fraggler

    fraggler A Happy & Busy Life

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  5. Lyander

    Lyander Official SBAF Equitable Empathizer

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    Didn't we have a thread exactly about this some time ago? Including (Mass)Drop if memory serves (I still refuse to adopt the name change).

    The way I see it they make nice products at good prices, though the way certain components are voiced don't necessarily suit others' tastes. There's also the fact that certain products don't measure well despite allegedly sounding not-horrible— to some measurements matter quite a lot, and as much as I genuinely appreciate them and love learning about the more rudimentary ones (cuz that's all my weeny brain can handle TBH), subjectives and experienced listening still come out on top in my book.

    I ended up looking into it some time ago because my memory is terrible (hi brencho, haha), Schiit has had a few of their amps blow headphones to kingdom come. Whether or not the same's happened with other manufacturers' gear I didn't care to look into, but it seems to me that for the most part their shit works fine. Someone else pointed out that people are more likely to crap on a product that fails them online than they are to say that everything's working well; just human nature.

    As for their customer service, I've only ever chatted with L. via email but their response time is ridiculously quick even on off-days, and the engagements polite. That does NOT mean that other people's experiences should be invalidated though, and if verifiable grievances do exist then they should be addressed. I recall someone here specifically stating that Schiit disavowed support for dead-phones at some point or other, but can't find it just now. I mean, I'd hope that if I do end up with a Schiit amp (honestly probably won't, given my preferences, gear, and what I know about how they sound) and it kills my cans they'd be willing to cover that, but having not personally experienced that yet, I'll save myself the worry.

    Edit: @fraggler beat me to it. I forgot I was trying to be less long-winded. Shorter-winded?
     
  6. Poleepkwa

    Poleepkwa Friend

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    Schiit has two outspoken front-men.
    This usually invites conflict and strong differences of opinion.
    Less on this forum perhaps, but the same can be said of Chord, PS Audio, Audioquest, ect, around the interwebs.
     
    Last edited: Sep 4, 2019
  7. mkozlows

    mkozlows Friend

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    Reddit's culture, like ASMR's, is very measurement-centric -- fundamentally, it's people who believe that DACs and amps are a solved problem and that there's no reason to buy expensive ones, but who nevertheless are able to appreciate hyper-precision and so can give a thumbs-up to things that measure better, even if they believe those measurements aren't going to lead to audible differences.

    Schiit, with multibit DACs and tube amps, is not a company that's chasing measurements in the way THX or Benchmark are. They measure things, and their products behave well enough, but if you fundamentally believe that the only reason to spend $1K on a piece of gear is if it offers scientific instrument levels of hyper-precision, then Schiit seems like a scam.

    SBAF's culture looks at measurements as being a rough guide to utility, and believes that precision above a certain amount is worthless, but that there are sound qualities that aren't captured in the set of measurements in common use. For people here, if they believe the things measure non-brokenly and sound good, then that's what matters.

    Head-Fi's culture is one where people are excited by new devices, and as long as a device is interesting and cool, they want it and want to talk about it. Schiit introduces new things regularly, which keeps HF excited and talking.
     
  8. schiit

    schiit SchiitHead

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    I have my suspicions, but then again I'm biased.

    Hint: So are we all.

    But, to address the elephants in the room first (namely, shitty customer service and crap products), let's go head-on: yep, we did have a time when customer service got lax. Response times got long, and the people in Orders got testy. That's why we did a major re-org of that last year.

    Now, our response times are averaging 5-7 hours. Averaging. That's well, well ahead of any industry norm. Hell, the response time for support on our 3D printer--a piece of equipment much more critical than audio--was 3 days, and that was AFTER printing a test print and taking photos to help them see what was wrong with it. In addition, Orders is now super-focused on making you happy. No, we can't make everyone happy, but it's much more "what can we do," and less, "this is the letter of the law."

    With respect to shitty products, we still have only one full-time tech, who handles all the 500K products out in the field, as well as failures in-house due to production. Again, way way way way ahead of industry norms. The reality is that we design first and foremost for reliability. Of course, there are catches, such as with high-powered tube hybrid product like Lyr...especially since it uses octal tubes, which are much easier to misalign than novals. Misalign a tube in Lyr 3, and boom, headphone is junk. Beyond that, we haven't had any more than the usual failures on Lyr 3. Bue we're learning—we learned enough to add a DC sense and protect circuit early on with Lyr 3, so now there's no possible chance of a misaligned tube taking out a headphone.

    But that gets us to "silent revisions." And, on the "silent revisions" front, that's another thing where people hate us, and sometimes for good reason. We have, in the past, made changes to our products not considered significant enough to call an update or upgrade. This was dumb. Now everyone is uncertain what they have. So we won't be doing that going forward. Yeah, so like letting customer service slip, that's on us.

    But I think there are a few more things, too:

    1. Selling direct. This meant we had exactly zero allies in the dealer and distributor world when we started, we confused all the established publications, and we irritated a ton of other manufacturers because we could price things lower. Now that direct is becoming more of a thing (PS Audio is going direct in the USA as of this month, I believe), that may change, but the move certainly didn't help us win friends.

    2. Being opinionated. I'm a bit more agnostic, but both Mike and I have gone on record with some fairly extreme opinions, and opinions are usually not good. You're supposed to follow the Product Plan. You're supposed to use the Suggested Reference Designs. You're supposed to swallow new formats and Toe The Party Line. So when we say something like, "Yeah, we're not doing MQA because we think it's a power grab and we don't like compressed music," or "delta-sigma is for when music doesn't matter," we piss off a lot of people.

    3. Being cheap. Lots of people want to spend lots more money. That's fine. Have at it. But when we say, "We won't do a DAC more costly than Yggdrasil," or "We won't do a preamp above Freya+," some take it as a challenge to the established order of more money = more better. Heck, some people don't like it when we say Magni is all the headphone amp you'll ever need, or that Modi 3 is all the DAC you may ever want. But that's not spitting on high-end stuff, is it? It's just a fact, in a world where 99.9% of the population is fine with a smartphone or computer as a source straight to their headphones.

    4. Being popular. Lots of people don't want to have what everyone else has. And we have a ton of product out there. You know who has WAY more product out there? Bose. Everyone looooves to hate on Bose, and as they hate on Bose, Bose keeps growing. Same with us.

    TL; DR: Yeah, we fucked up customer service, but we fixed it, our products are more than usually reliable by any sane metric, we screwed up doing silent revisions so we've stopped that, but we ain't gonna stop selling direct or being opinionated or being cheap. As far as being popular, so far so good.
     
  9. Stuff Jones

    Stuff Jones Friend

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  10. Hands

    Hands Overzealous Auto Flusher - Measurbator

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    Reddit is full of armchair internet expert types that want to be big boys behind their keyboard but are insecure in public.

    Some 13-23 year old finds one site that does measurements, doesn't really understand them fully, but takes them at their word, and then bases all recommendations on that.

    "I know X is the best for the money because I saw a graph for it on Y site."

    They simultaneously are too quick to accept someone as an authority yet act themselves as an authority when questioned. Lots of regurgitating tidbits of misunderstood information because they don't have the knowledge, motivation, or creativity to go any further.

    They like to pretend they're scientists and intellectuals but aren't willing to see if they can replicate findings. They might toss it up as a lack of time or money, but anyone with that level of asshattery-confidence knows they could (and should) try to scrounge together what they can to peer review, both for their own learning and interest and to actually help the community. They could take the time to try subjectivity out for themselves but put a mental block in place.

    Some of this also stems from most of them being used to picking their CPU and GPU based on simple graphs and the like. They're also the types that would have said, "LOL you can't see past 60Hz" or, "Both of these GPUs get 60fps average, so they're the same" back in the day when discussing high refresh rate monitors, how fps is an average over time (we have since learned about frame timing and its importance), etc.

    I know I've touched on this before, but Reddit is a great place for wannabes that give the impression of having knowledge at face value but have no real experience or depth in the field.

    It makes it that much easier that you can setup a myriad of random accounts in a fairly anonymous fashion.

    People here probably know who I am, so I don't have to pretend like I'm not dumb as f**k.

    However, to be fair to the common Reddit poster, they're often limited on cash and are paranoid about getting screwed for their money. So it makes sense that they try to play it safe with on-paper results. It's too easy to get burned with crappy products on Amazon that get flooded with fake reviews, so why would audio gear be different?

    The rest of the stuff I'm not going to comment on because those topics in particular have been covered elsewhere.
     
  11. Hands

    Hands Overzealous Auto Flusher - Measurbator

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    TFW Jason tells me I misaligned a tube in my Lyr 3.
     
  12. Ksaurav402

    Ksaurav402 Friend

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    I can confirm that the customer care experience for me has been great so far. I remember around 3 years back I asked customer care some questions but I got very standard response however around this time I got very detailed explanation for same question and I got reply within an hour of asking it.
    I felt important and was taken care of
     
  13. ultrabike

    ultrabike Measurbator - Admin

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    More folks in other sites don't have a girlfriend (or boyfriend).
     
  14. insidious meme

    insidious meme Ambivalent Kumquat

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    For me it comes down to: who do you trust?

    Granted I've been lucky to be around people who seem to know their shit and go beyond the "I love/hate this product" pablum that seems to pervade many sites. I don't worry about alot of "reviews" because it's pretty obvious where the bias of the reviewer is.

    @schiit answering in this thread will have the requisite trolling or word twisting on other sites. Bidness as usual.
     
  15. RobS

    RobS RobS? More like RobDiarrhea.

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    A lot of the Schiit hate on Reddit is mostly old disinformation that's been spread. One person has a customer service issue and that spreads like wildfire among the knuckle draggers which just fuels groupthink.

    I buy Schiit products because of this reason:

    ^ this matters more than any measurements. When you have an engineer who focuses on these kind of musical experiences over chasing the numbers game, you can probably trust them to deliver some damn good sounding products. People like Mike are rare nowadays, I wish there were more people like him creating audio products. It's going to be a sad day when he's no longer doing it.

    I'm sure Jason probably has the same approach to designing gear.

    For VALUE there doesn't seem anywhere else to go. The various Chi-Fi products and everything else in the same budget just don't sound nearly as good. Hell I wouldn't have bought an HE-6 if I wasn't able to put together the best value/budget single-ended system together.

    Schiit came at the perfect time to fill in that "no-man's land" space for audiophiles on a budget. And they keep improving their products while not seeing any steep price increases.

    Are there better products out there from different brands? Sure but I just don't care cause I'll stick to what I know, and what I know is what I like. I've bought their products since they started, original Lyr 1 and Bifrost, and they just have the sound I'm into at a great price. Glad I don't have to spend thousands of dollars on audiophile brands just to get something that sounds good.
     
  16. Vtory

    Vtory Audiophile™

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    I think the title of this thread is VERY misleading as is and (thus) should be changed to "Why is Schiit hated by ASR and Reddit". Those two places don't deserve to 'elsewhere' imho.
     
  17. ultrabike

    ultrabike Measurbator - Admin

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    Fixed.
     
  18. netforce

    netforce MOT: Headphones.com

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    From what I have seen, things are good and then get popular, then people try to find faults and never stop attacking faults.

    I see it all the time with things we sell, people will bring up an issue in a product that was fixed years ago but they still read about it online and then are skeptical about the product.

    Whatever you make becomes popular stuff and with fame comes criticism. Sometimes its easy to dispel and sometimes it is complicated. We get guys in this hobby that don't care unless the gear just sounds good. And then we get guys who care about the smallest things. The most vocal ones out there get heard and then the ones who don't say anything don't get heard.

    Just hit 9 years on my reddit account so I have seen quite some trends and changes on the headphones subreddit. Things can be popular one day and then the next get shit on. Bandwagoning and circlejerking has always been around and swings to loving Schiit for a while to hating it. The rules change all the time, popular posts are either pretty pictures of gear or memes. Content I care about is drowned out by people asking for recommendations. You don't get rewarded with upvotes for posting a good review or impressions, you get to the top with meme formats photoshopped with headphones in it.
     
  19. Scott Kramer

    Scott Kramer Friend

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  20. Stuff Jones

    Stuff Jones Friend

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    That implies that the overwhelming SBAF positivity towards Schiit is justified based on reality whereas the negative views are just hate. I wanted to frame it more impartially.
     
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