Magni 3+ and Magni 3 Heresy released

Discussion in 'Headphone Amplifiers and Combo (DAC/Amp) Units' started by redrich2000, Nov 29, 2019.

  1. RobS

    RobS RobS? More like RobDiarrhea.

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    The ASR/Reddit crowd are just insecure. Just look at the triumphalism on gear they can afford but "measures extremely well". Anything out of their reach is snake oil and a waste of money. They are the most vocal because they are the most insecure.
     
  2. Lyander

    Lyander Official SBAF Equitable Empathizer

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    Soapbox moment but this was me circa 2011 or so. I was a card carrying member of the "tubes are distortion, anyone who spends more than X is a fool!" clique and it wasn't until I was able to demo more stuff, and more importantly gained some disposable income I could put towards building a nicer system, that I realised I was really kinda full of myself.

    I'm not saying that I might not sometimes make things up out of whole cloth, especially in demo or meet conditions with upstream components (my listening skills could use refining I think), or that anyone might immediately change their mind the same way I did given the opportunity. At the end of the day it's about finding what sounds best to us for what we can have, and enjoying songs and pieces we love (even if those with horrible taste in music make fun of them from time to time ;)). The main reason I dislike when certain other people not currently part of the community here get brought up is that their name and ideologies only serve to divide enthusiasts. I like to think that, while others might feel discomfiture at having their beliefs contested, once these same people get to a point where they've grown confidence in their own ears and listening ability then differences in opinion might serve to foster genuine conversation instead of shouting matches like they currently do.

    Don't think we'll get to that point any time soon though.

    @Soliloqueen like for <redacted>; genuinely made me chuckle, haha.
     
    Last edited: Dec 10, 2019
  3. Raimei Templar

    Raimei Templar Friend

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    I see those measurements now and the error is indeed there. I was under the impression that everyone was unaware of it but seems they were and just weren't concerned about it as it was unlikely to cause audible issues which certainly changes things.

    I can say that information did not clearly make its way to reddit, head fi etc which is not all that surprising to given the current culture. It was probably there but buried in a sea of down votes.

    I can also see how it could be a negative if people only buy things that measure insanely well but I think that once more amps that measure equally good but sound different come out it might change minds about the whole thing. Maybe I have too much faith lol.

    I also think that it's great for companies like Schiit to show up front that when you buy something like a yggsdrasil you are getting something that doesn't measure well. It makes it so consumers don't feel like they got ripped off when someone points out the measurements not being extremely great. Though for the record I think the measurements shown in the Schiit AP report are actually quite impressive for a multibit dac.

    As for the haves versus have-nots aspect there is definitely truth to that. A lot of the dogmatic arguments used remind me so much of the idiotic "human eye can't see more than 30 fps" post you used to see anytime someone started talking about the benefits of high refresh rates. That always came from someone who could not afford anything better and there is a good chance a lot of the whole just use your pc motherboard you don't need a dac comes from the same place.
     
  4. schiit

    schiit SchiitHead

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    A couple of things:

    1. I don't think anyone needs to worry about us abandoning our wacky directions. Hell, I'm still actively developing products with tubes. And if you want scary measurements, they're as close as Vali 2. Which would be interesting to add into a blind test. Hmm.

    2. For the small/desktop speaker amp guys, I have spent two years working on Class D. It did not perform well enough for us to make a product out of it. (Before you go all pitchforky, let me repeat: it didn't work well enough for US. That doesn't mean someone else can't do it.) I'm now working on a different direction that may be very, very interesting. I'll know more in about a month after we build some prototypes.

    3. I think we got our APx555 in February 2018, as part of a much larger program to upgrade our testing regime. We also purchased 6 Avermetrics AverLabs, which are used for production testing, and also sometimes in development. They are very nice machines for the price. We also retain a Stanford Research SR1A, and Mike added a bunch of weird USB interface stuff and an RF spectrum analyzer for FCC prequalification. Which reminds me, I should do an updated chapter about measurements.

    4. All that said, yes, we're constantly learning and trying to improve. We listen to all input. We may not always be able to respond to it in the way you want, but I do like to explain the why's and wherefores of what we do, like I did with the potentiometers/volume controls earlier. And we have focused internally on improving quality--of products, of support, etc--across the board this year. This probably does make us a more "real" company. And that's fine. I just don't think we'll ever be what you call totally sane.

    5. It's interesting to see how things break down internally with Magni 3+ and Heresy. We have guys who just love the heck out of 3+, and others who love Heresy. None of this is based on measurements, this is just people listening to it. Hell, Eddie loooooooves Heresy. Which is pretty funny, because he also loves Loki Mini. And Modi Multibit. So there you go.

    Thanks for listening to our blather, and I hope you enjoy our...er, Schiit!
     
  5. bboris77

    bboris77 Friend

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    I received both the Magni 3+ and the Heresy earlier today. First impressions - the Magni 3+ is spectacular sounding. While it is very difficult to pin down why it is more enjoyable to listen to compared to the original Magni 3, one thing I can come up with is that it simply sounds less strained at higher volume settings. It compares well to a much more powerful amp like the Lyr 3 (obviously without being able to deliver the same power). It also sounds much more spacious and has better staging then the Magni 3. The soundstage is 3-dimensional and there is definite sense of depth rather than simply width. I found the original Magni 3 lacked the width. While I would not call it warm, the Magni 3+ is definitely not a clinical sounding amp at any volume or gain setting. An absolutely amazing achievement for a $99 amp.

    I have mixed feelings on the Heresy. I absolutely love the styling and the textured black finish contrasted with the shiny red paint - it looks a lot more attractive than the plain Magni 3+. It also delivers a bit more power to both my LCD2C and HD600 compared to the Magni 3+. I don't know why Schiit rates these amps the same when it appears that the Heresy has more power on tap. The sound differences are harder to describe, but it definitely reminds me of the Atom that I used to own with significantly more power on tap. It is a very neutral amp which is perfect for studio monitoring. It has solid bass, it is very detailed, but the mids are slightly too dry for my liking. The soundstage is less 3-dimensional compared to the Magni 3+. It also sounds a little wider as Marv mentioned which leads to less cohesive staging. I have a feeling that the Heresy could potentially be better for FPS gaming than the Magni 3+ as it will probably expose footstep sounds more effectively. Ultimately though, it was not as fun as the Magni 3+ when it came to pure music enjoyment. It is as if Jason fine-tuned the Magni 3+ to do exactly what is needed for maximum music enjoyment and the Heresy is jack of all trades but master of none.

    I actually may keep both amps as they are different enough to warrant owning both and the Heresy may have its specific uses for gaming, recording and mixing.

    BTW, while I do believe that measurements have their place, it is interesting that the conventional ways of measuring amplifier performance cannot account for any of the sonic differences that I just described. Sure, objectivists will think I am just deluding myself to justify my purchase, but just because science has not found a way to measure these differences does not mean that we have to ignore what our ears and brains are telling us. That would be delusional.
     
  6. atomicbob

    atomicbob dScope Yoda

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    Addressing both points at once. We live in amazing times where exceptional sound quality is available at much more reasonable price points. At this point in my career I could have any of the big boy amps. However I am more than happy to spend time listening with SW51+, ZDT Jr. and BH crack. Amazing performance / price ratios.

    And here is the crux of the measurement problem. The assumption that measurements follow sports paradigm of winners / losers. Lower is better. Bigger is better. X is better (substitute X for your favorite metric.) That paradigm is incorrect, but used by simplistic minds incapable or unwilling to understand performance profiles.

    The real power of measurements is to assess performance profiles when consistent, comparable suites are available across components, and begin to look for matches to personal preferences, also an advanced concept.
     
  7. atomicbob

    atomicbob dScope Yoda

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    My sentiments, exactly.
     
  8. mkozlows

    mkozlows Friend

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    I don't think it's particularly useful to assume the worst possible motive for anyone, especially when the truth is a lot simpler:

    1. A lot of audiophiles advocate straight-up, 100% pure snake-oil magic bullshit. Power cords, audiophile Ethernet cables, the works.

    2. A lot more of audiophilia is "luxury audio" where the goal isn't to make something that sounds particularly good, but to make fancy electronic jewelry for rich people's listening rooms. It's not particularly controversial to say that a lot of those $500K speakers aren't really all that good.

    3. And meanwhile, entry-level equipment is actually shockingly good. When I'm listening to music in bed, I plug my Verite into a Magni 3/Modi Multibit stack, and it sounds friggin' great.

    So when budding audiophiles go out there and buy their cheap $99 amps and they hear something that sounds great, and then the people who are saying "oh, no, you totally really need to spend thousands more to get the REALLY good sound" are also in many cases the people who are pushing magic and/or jewelry, it's not going to take much of a nudge for them to carelessly sweep everyone into the "bullshit artist" category.

    What's been weird to me, though, is how Schiit got swept into that. I mean, this is a company whose whole thing is that their products are inexpensive and really drove down gear prices, and Jason is always out there saying "you probably don't need more than a Magni."
     
  9. schiit

    schiit SchiitHead

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    Someone once wrote that we should decouple ourselves from "the big crazy," which I believe is a great phrase for all the magical-thinking stuff. The problem is that "the big crazy" has been extremely influential in the business (a reviewer actually used Vidar with $20,000 cables--not kidding). But perhaps it is time to start the decoupling. Because I'm really really tired of having to hold my tongue when I'm shown yet another fuse that costs more than a Magni, ethernet cables that cost more than an Yggdrasil, or magic box that connects to nothing but somehow is supposed to improve the sound.
     
  10. mkozlows

    mkozlows Friend

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    Ha, I think that might have been me. What can I say, it's really annoying having to constantly be on the defensive about my hobbies to my friends.
     
  11. schiit

    schiit SchiitHead

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    LOL, yes! Ha!

    Sorry to continue the derail, but this is an excellent point: the big crazy is holding audio back.

    As soon as you start talking about cables/power supplies/stones/quantum resonance machines (or, for that matter, $20K preamps, $50K amps, and $500K speakers), sane people check out. You're crazy. And they're gone.
     
  12. Soliloqueen

    Soliloqueen Friend

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    Honestly, when it comes to this argument, I see a lot of people arguing that we need absolutely clean measurements, and other people insisting "measurements don't capture everything" when their favorite head amp turns out to have high distortion...but maybe...just maybe...the high distortion is why the headamp sounds good! Maybe people kind of like distortion a little bit! This concept seems hard for a lot of people to grasp, but I love my 650s precisely BECAUSE they have high higher-order distortion in the mid bass! It's not accurate, but it's pretty-sounding.

    Maybe some day we'll figure out all the reasons why amps sound how they do, and then we'll be able to design them however we want! In my ideal world, we'd use measurements to verify that our amps are the kind of wrong we're designing them to be.
     
    Last edited: Dec 10, 2019
  13. jexby

    jexby Posole Prince

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    strange no one has mentioned differences in tactile feeling of the external casing of each unit.
    magni3+ is super polished. feels like an italian marble top table, uber smooth like melted butter.
    Heresy is rougher in texture, and hisses at you when running fingers across the top of the chassis.

    awaiting further upvotes by Currawongdong regarding this all important fingering difference.
     
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  14. SSL

    SSL Friend

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    nwavguy. There are still people out there eager for schiit to be caught with their pants down. I doubt Amir would have gained nearly as much traction if the seeds weren't already sown.
     
  15. Hands

    Hands Overzealous Auto Flusher - Measurbator

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    I know folks already responded to address most of this, but wanted to add my thoughts nonetheless.

    1. Though a lot of us don't/didn't have money to afford something like an AP unit, we've done a lot of work with modest, but surprisingly solid, sound cards. This dates back to Changstar. Measurements are really f'ing hard to not mess up. It took a lot of trial and error to optimize our testing and results. We still even make mistakes today. Some of us stopped doing measurements, some continued, and some got way better gear over time.

    Anyway, yeah, that glitch in the older model Schiit multibit DACs was well known by us, and many others, for a long time. AP, ASR, they had nothing to do with it. Stereophile was the first to make it more widely known, I think.

    Anyway, Schiit's stuff wasn't/isn't the only multibit DACs to have switching/crossover glitches. We've measured it before, and it's commonly mentioned in datasheets.

    As for Schiit, was it really that bad? No. Just a little blip in the grand scheme of things. So, then, you have to ask, "How does it sound?"

    I think we've mentioned, here or in another thread, that Amir's early linearity tests were flawed. He also made up his own form of ENOB, I think with a value of +/- 0.1dB. That's absurd! Industry standard is something like...+/- 0.5dB, maybe 1dB.

    On the early Modi MB measurements, we don't see major deviations until around -90dB, maybe a little after.

    You gotta remember, it was a budget, multibit DAC, and the chip is explicitly specified for only 16-bits of performance. (Hint: multibit DACs almost never hit the actual accuracy for which they specify. The TDA1541, for example, is probably only truly accurate to about 14 or 15-bits, which is still pretty good if it's real 14 or 15 bits. 16 bits will be -96dB, don't forget, so re-look at Modi MB v1 results in that light, and keep the scales in mind.)

    Yeah, the early Bifrost MB had some quirks to its subjective and measured performance. There's a reason that most of us, for a long, long time, tended to prefer and recommend the Modi MB over its bigger brother.

    What you might not have noticed is that Schiit has done silent, rolling updates to the previous gen Bifrost MB. Ended up with a new main board, from what I could tell, new firmware, upped to 8X oversampling I think (Modi MB still at 4x), etc. It measures much better than early units.

    So, yeah, nothing due to dithering. Dithering just improves measured performance. The glitch is inherent to a lot of multibit DACs when dealing with switching/crossover points (bits flipping). Most precision/non-audio multibit DACs don't do anything to address this, because they're not meant for audio. Old school audio multibit DACs usually had measures to address this internally.

    Yes, Schiit was aware. Yes, we were aware. Publicly, we posted about this in a short manner once the products were publicly released.

    We've done measurements for a while, to the best of our abilities and financial situations. None of this stuff is new or surprising to us.

    We do a ton of subjective listening tests, see if we can correlate, try to look into new measurements (if time allows in life!), blah blah, but ultimately fall back on if we hear something we think sounds good.

    Sit down with the Shortest Way 51+ amp. It measures like ass if you're an objectivist. Add some solid state and other tube amps into the mix. Do blind testing. I'll be you a taco you would think it was one of the solid state amps if you didn't know.
     
  16. Raimei Templar

    Raimei Templar Friend

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    I cannot agree with this more. It is a real turn off to people when audiophile rocks enter the equation. I have had people look at me with shock when I say I am an audiophile and I am sure that is the kind of thing they think I am into.

    It really does hold the hobby back. I haven't been in this hobby nearly as long as many of the you here and man there is so much bullshit out there its hard to navigate. Say you don't like a pair of headphones and you would get a comment along the lines of "Yeah they sound like crap at first but slap this $400 cable on them and they sound like a dream!" I have to say that kind of thing is a huge turn off to a younger person just getting into all this stuff.

    On the other side I remember thinking amps/dacs sounded different even when I first tried some different ones and having people tell me I must think diamond crusted cables are awesome too. After a while I figured it must all be bs and I was placeboing myself . Particularly when I was told there are countless studies which say I cannot possibly be right.

    I hope there is a big push to get the nonsense out. I certainly support your idea to decouple, Jason. It would be great to see companies do that. I very much appreciate how open and communitive you are with the community here and elsewhere.

    Sorry for derailing the thread as well and thanks for all the responses. I learned quite a bit. Thanks all for taking the time to read and give such detailed responses.
     
  17. RobS

    RobS RobS? More like RobDiarrhea.

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    Your impressions >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Torq's lengthy review you originally quoted that I disliked.

    Seriously, your impressions are persuasive enough to add the Magni 3+ to the shopping cart. Well written and concise.

    I want more opinions from bboris77 on gear and less you asking about what other people think.

    I'm a cynical bastard. But I'm just saying it is rather curious the people who are constantly shouting from the rooftops with shit like "Schiit sucks, R2R DACs measure like garbage=don't buy, if you like tubes you like distortion, there's nothing worth buying past $99, Atom greatest amp evar, etc.", just seems there are some serious doubts with the stuff they have.

    They have no problem mocking people who have more expensive gear. I just wanna smack these people cause all they are doing is regurgitating what their Lord and Savior Amir preaches and whatever other groupthink hearsay.

    The finest soundsystem I have ever heard was a set of electrostatic speakers, a tube amp, turntable and tons of vinyl records that would probably run north of $30k+ in the used market. At the time I heard this I was dirt poor, living out of a car, surviving at food banks, etc. Trust me that system was worth every penny. I would not be surprised if one day his vinyl collection became valued at like a $1M.

    If you throw in a few grand into the right setup, it will beat inflation. The collector's market can make certain consumer purchases not be a total waste of money.

    And thing is I am willing to bet money that none of these guys on Reddit/ASR have any decent recordings at their disposal to get the most out of any decent system they listen to. Shit the crap I own now is practically overkill for the garbage I listen to.

    Now granted I'll give people for not spending much on headphone gear or wanting to be ripped off they are broke college students. But don't preach about hating on shit you've never heard or because some "guru" tells you so. That shit pisses me off.

    More and more I'm starting to believe @Psalmanazar has it right about audio. Some of his opinions can be grating, but I'm with him on dislike of headphones. The utter lack of staging is becoming more and more impossible to ignore over time. The HE-6 is the least fucked of staging compared to the HD650, but these things can't hold a candle to even the most modest pair of JBL 305s. And sometimes the details can be too forward with headphones. Then there's the fatigue. Thank God for the HD650 that is relaxed enough to not reproduce every sonic detail that will flatten in my brain like a pair of Sony studio monitors. I also don't buy what the recording engineer originally heard is the gold standard either. Now if you ever taken drugs, like LSD, some music will never be the same again no matter what kind of gear I use.

    Yeah I don't get how they got swept into that either. They hit the market at the perfect time in the aftermath of the financial crisis. They also allowed poor porkers like me to get something that sounds good for cheap.

    Do you guys remember what the headphone amp/DAC world was like back in 2009 and prior? I remember the only stuff around was shit like FiiO, or Little Dot amps or those uber-expensive HeadRoom amps (my memory might be off, but I thought they were expensive). There was literally nothing else in the affordable space. To think we were buying HD650s and HD800s without amplifiers...

     
  18. itchy

    itchy New

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    Excuse me, are you trying to tell me there is a sound difference between the 3+ and Heresy? Because Amir told me I can't let you do that.
     
  19. bboris77

    bboris77 Friend

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    ;)

    All joking aside, I don't understand why hardcore objectivists cannot accept the fact that two amps that have a perfectly flat frequency response can sound different. Instead of trying to say that thousands of listeners are simply deluded into believing that different amps have different sound signatures, they should be trying to devise better testing methodologies and experiments to account for these sonic differences. The first step could be to identify the differences - an actual piece of music could be run through the same pair of headphones and recorded with a high quality microphone. The resulting recordings could then be nulled to identify any differences between them. I am sure someone has tried to do this.

    Ultimately, if all amps with a flat frequency response and low distortion figures sounded identical at normal listening volumes, headphone amplifier development would have stopped in the 1970s. I mean, why keep on struggling to improve something that is essentially perfect?
     
  20. purr1n

    purr1n Desire for betterer is endless.

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    Yup. As discussed earlier or in another thread, we have no idea what equipment was used in the mastering stage. Ultimately the gold standard is whatever you like. Ultimately, music reproduction is music reinterpretation, even if amps were perfect, we still have to deal with speakers. Speakers measure horribly compared to amps.

    @Soliloqueen mentioned that a bit of distortion might be good. This is actually a good argument against 0.000x THD amps because the amps in the mastering stages are going to be more along the lines of 0.0x THD.
     

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