just curious, a lot of people love the fact the Magni and Atom pump out so much power. I know the Magni can distort at the higher end of it’s peak, not sure about the Atom…which really limits the usefulness of having so much power. is there anything with 2 - 3w in the $200 - $300 range that doesn’t distort?
The schiit asgard 3 would be your best bet imo for that. Also the emotiva basx a100 would work for that with jumpers removed, but I don’t think it sounds as good as the asgard 3
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what does the Asgard 3 do better than the Emotiva A100?
It’s better sounding. It does a better job at actually driving headphones (as it was designed to first and foremost, and the basx a100 is a speaker amp). It was designed to drive headphones, it just sounds better with most headphones. I don’t really want to get into the technical aspect.
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you mean the A100 is a speaker am first and foremost with headphones as a convenient afterthought?
can you define what you mean by ‘it drives headphones better’? what is the Asgard 3 doing the A100 does not?
Ok, so the headphone out on the basx a100 is unique in the fact that you can easily remove jumpers and use the full fat speaker amp design to drive your headphones. This yields gobs of power, but at the same time isn’t ideal for headphones. You end up having an increased noise floor, the amp driving a load higher then it would be used too, and also not as much detail and proper driving capability as a headphone amp that was designed to power headphones not speakers
Think of it like using a v8 or a proper sized engine in a car and slapping it in a go cart or something like that. Not really ideal for the job and kinda mismatched (or vice versa, like a small 2 stroke weed wacker engine in a full size modern car or truck (as I know some older vehicles were almost at that point lol)
You didn’t mention the SP 200. how do you think that Stacks against Asgard?
Lol thanks for reminding me, I was going to come back and mention it and got sidetracked. It’s pretty great and personally I would take it over the asgard 3. But for 300 usd for the asgard with a dac built in it might be more compelling for those on a stricter budget to go with the asgard 3
Speaker amps are optimized to drive 4-8 Ohm loads that don’t change much.
Headphones have much higher impedences, and they can vary all over the place by frequency.
A pair of HD598’s is rated at 50 Ohms, but with a 100Hz signal it impedence is closer to 300 Ohms.
The Fact that headphones and speakers are not constant resistive loads is one of the reasons frequency sweeps into constant loads don’t give you a representative indicator of how an amp sounds.
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Music is the best way for sure 
Also thanks for the more apt explanation, I can never seem to easily sum up what I am thinking lol
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is the SP200 so much better than the A3 that it justifies the fact it’s 50% more?
I think the asgard has better bang for the buck if you don’t plan to run balanced, but I think it’s worth the price upgrade to the sp200 if you want separate components and balanced since now you can find them on sale for like 260 ish now. Also I think it’s somewhat a matter of preference too, as I think the sp200 leans a bit analytical where the asgard 3 might lean towards balanced but a tad warm
but the balanced output power of the SP200 is the same as the single ended…it does not provide the advantage balanced is supposed to give.
I think it still marginally sounds better than the single ended output, but not by much. It’s really up to the person, as they may have other balanced gear and also might just want balanced for the sake of balanced. The power output is the same but the balanced out does provide the same balanced headphone out benefits (however marginal they may be)
Basx100 harmonic distortion .1% most headphone amps harmonic distortion is .001%
Yeah, that’s going to be way more noticeable on headphones than speakers
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thanks @M0N! i should of put that in, was rush looking at some topics at the end of the shift of work last nite lol =) I should of elaborated more. But yeah, while harmonic distortion doesn’t tell the whole store at all, it is a pretty good initial value to use to judge the rough ballpark performance of solid state amps. Tube amps have distortion by default and nature and thereby cannot really be judged by that value.
I felt the need to chime in on the Emotiva BasX, it has a good amount of power and most importantly headroom. Problem is it only works well with higher impedance headphones or hard to drive lower impedance cans. (BTW, I bought it to use in “Beast” mode only, I really don’t remember what it sounds like with the jumpers in, so all my comments are about it with jumpers out.)
Also the big problem is the noise floor. There is a perceptible whine that drives me crazy at lower volumes, and sometimes even once the volume is up to a moderate level with any can under 300ohms. As I add better equipment to my stable I have trouble justifying keeping my Emotiva because I just can’t easily get beyond the noise floor. Currently I’m only really able to enjoy it with my HD6xx’s. I’m waiting on my ZMF’s which are 300ohm to see what they sound like on it.
I am able to slightly mitigate the whine with careful control out of my pre-amps when I play with the volume levels And it’s an awesome speaker amp, seriously no complaints with it there. Also I have found it works well as a headphone amp with good silent gobs of power when I use my speaker to headphone adaptor. For these reasons it continues to stay on my desk for now.