AFAIK there is a barrel to barrel cable included.
The Furman units are to treat “dirty” grid power, the Palmer box is to help your guitar paddle (or headphone amp) be more resilent to meh-tier powerbricks.
Important note: The Plamer Purifier is for DC only! Some Schiit gear has AC PSUs
Edit: Like the Magnius, apparantly… So what I thought to be a diode may be a full bridge rectifier.
I’ve heard of this… full bridge rectifier. shocks self ouch!
Some quick impressions, this is an interesting amp. You can tell it really seems like a beefed up heresy (hence the black and high measured performance), but I gotta say for my initial impressions, I don’t know how to feel about it. It is a well done amp so far, plenty of power and control, seemingly good detail, timbre is pretty solid, nothing offensive to my ears at the moment. Imaging is sharp and soundstage is average. Very clean as one would expect. Single ended performance does suffer compared to balanced as expected, but honestly that’s not really a complaint you can make for a balanced differential amp at this price point (but I would actually suggest you go for the topping L30 for single ended if you want a similar sound, will get to that later). The build is pretty great and the volume pot is def an upgrade over other schiit volume pots esp stuff like the magnis. Would suggest using in high gain, I do think the schiit products preform better in high gain.
But I also have an asgard 3 next to it, and I gotta say mostly every headphone I have tried so far I tend to prefer it on the a3 over the magnius with the exception of some of my iems and also the 58x, k371. Personally I actually think lower level detail feels a bit smoothed out on the magnius over the asgard which is pretty interesting, along with the asgards more impressive spatial recreation, although the asgard 3 is clearly more colored where the magnius seems more neutral here (but the asgard 3 is more natural in it’s presentation as well). But honestly I don’t think that coloration is that important and prominent, the asgard 3 is still an amp that isn’t too thickly colored. I do think the magnius is a faster and snappier sounding amp, but I just generally so far pretty much prefer the asgard 3 (except with some iems because of lower noise floor for the extremely sensitive ones but for most iems the a3 is just as quiet, and the 58x and k371 sound a bit too thick on the asgard 3 imo)
So far, these impressions actually haven’t been with the modius, they have actually been hooked up to my main desk with my main dacs that I have on hand, I wanted to get a sense of how these amps can really preform to their maximum. Generally I actually think the asgard 3 can scale better and reveal more about the dac I am listening to than the magnius can, which is a bit surprising, but generally both don’t scale absurdly well nor are they really that picky in the end. Out of my main desktop dacs I tend to find myself using the more colored and spatially exaggerated dacs with the magnius where I tended to stick with something more neutral/natural with the asgard 3 if that says anything lol.
When I actually switched with the modius, I start to like the magnius more than I initially did when I was using a few of the higher end more neutral dacs, which also surprised me. The modius + magnius is a more enjoyable combo than compared to using something like a topping e30, zen dac, or like an allo revolution actually, the modius gives the magnius more life and generally improved it’s tonality and organicness, but still not on the same level as the asgard 3, but I was enjoying it more than before. The issues I have with the magnius are still present, just less of a glaring issue to me now when paired with the modius, and generally it’s a more compelling stack when you have both the magnius and modius.
Going back to the topping l30, I got this in recently, and quickly doing some comparisons, they share a decent amount of similarities imo. I will say that to my ears the magnius is generally more capable than the l30 when balanced, but single ended I actually prefer the L30, the single ended output of the magnius sounds almost dulled or somewhat lifeless, not as enjoyable as the balanced output imo, and the l30 while not being as high preforming as the magnius in balanced, gets close to balanced performance single ended and is an improvement from the magnius SE.
Regarding comparisons to more midrange amps, I don’t think this is really punching above it’s price too much, I might actually say the asgard 3 would do that more tbh. I do pretty much prefer the magnius to the topping a90, and the topping l30 already pretty much removed the need to buy the a90 anyways imo, so there’s that. Also pretty easily prefer over the thx amps, so not much to say there besides that. I don’t think that really either the magnius or asgard 3 compete much with some of my $500 favorites (see stuff like the rnhp, g111, liquid platinum, gilmore lite mk2, hagerman tuba, bhc+sb, etc), but I think the asgard 3 gives you a better taste at what is able to be had above.
So basically, it’s a competent amp but I generally prefer the asgard 3 most if not all of the time and think it has more to offer you than the magnius, but this is only after having a few days with the magnius, so idk. I don’t know about schiit moving in this direction, personally I would like to see them take what they did with the asgard and improve upon that, instead of focusing on making things like the magnius that just didn’t impress me as much.
Did you hook up your Abyss to it? Kind of curious what happens when you push some thirstier headphones it could potentially drive.
Also:
For your full review… break that up into parts. Reading the entire unabridged review will require the same setup for reading a Ray Bradbury story.
Awesome. Thanks, @M0N.
FWIW:
I have observed this with Magni 3 and Asgard 3 too.
I think they’re doing this in response to the market. There’s been a flood of op-amp based designs under $200 that must be selling well enough to get Schiit’s attention. So they’re getting into that market segment too to keep their name out there (and it’s a great name) and probably fund their R&D for the kind of stuff you want them to keep making. I think the Magni 3+ and Heresy releasing at the same time suggests that they’re doing both types of designs. But, they are a small company so their time is a somewhat low zero-sum game.
M0N, a few questions.
haha !! that’s funny
I did, the 1266 sounded pretty bad, the diana v2 was decent enough though, had nice punch and was decently controlled, although wasn’t that impressive spatially and generally it just felt pretty dull and uninteresting, typically not what I want from those cans lol. The asgard 3 also struggled with the 1266, but the v2 was generally more accurate on the asgard 3, with better spatial recreation, a more organic sound, and more natural presentation, more inline with what I expect them to be
Lol it’s no review, it’s just a stream of thoughts from the past two days, not much of a review, and are impressions as noted
Makes sense, their heresy sold a ton, if I were running that company, might as well appeal to that audience. Although I would like to see that measurement cash poured into a really cool totl design lol
Yes? But I can’t afford that yet. So selfishly I want to see them make a splash with a revamped Jot like they did with the revamped Asgard. If they do the same kind of quality job combined with aggressive pricing that they did with Asgard for the Jot in the ~$350 price range, they could cripple THX, IMO.
So I don’t have a heresy on hand anymore, but off memory honestly they are pretty close
So sorry for the poor phrasing, the L30 is a single ended amp. I think the L30 outperforms the single ended out of the magnius but it doesn’t sound as good as the magnius when you run the magnius balanced
Pretty much strait up prefer the a3 and it outperforms the magnius in some ways, and this is with the magnius balanced, I can see how that can be misinterpreted
Thanks for this write up M0N
They have already done that lol, I want to see them have the jot compete with the bigger dogs in the midrange to entry higher end space
I love this more than full reviews from other sources… exactly what needs to be heard. Thank you.
You think so? It’s my impression that in many circles THX tech is still seen as ‘endgame’. But you’re far more plugged into the broader community than me. Is there a general or growing feeling that Schiit is putting the hurt on THX?
So I think there is still a strange middle ground where thx is seen as the pinnacle of amp tech, but the topping a90/l30 and now the magnius/heresy have already outperformed the thx in some measurements and are the new benchmarks from a measurement standpoint (I think). So in that regard thx is already been beat. I think the people still focusing on thx are those that are either going off some specific reviewers or are drop fans I would guess. And then on the listening side of things thx wasn’t really that competitive to begin with imo so idk
Fair enough. I do wonder if Schiit has taken the Heresy and Magnius approach really just to get THX out of the way. It almost seems like Schiit has said “See, THX is nothing. We just out THX-Ed THX. And we also have these similarly priced products over here if you care about sound.” A crude way of stating it, but I think you get the idea.
Pretty much sounds like what they are doing from what I see and have heard, they can get customers from both audiences that way as well, so pretty viable from a business perspective
Now if they could only figure out how to sell internationally…
I find your review very interesting. I want to hear this through your ears lol.
I’ve only used it with the modius, and it seems happy there. Comparing it to the v280 I would be hard pressed to tell a difference. But I also don’t have that much experience critically listening. The gs-x has a distinctly different rendering but I lack the language to articulate the difference beyond that.
Could you offer some of what you’re listening for, particularly around so spacial recreation?
Or. Maybe I don’t want to know. Maybe it’s better thinking that a $1200 and $200 amp sound about the same. 