Schiit Freya + Class A in Stereophile

@invalid When Stereophile decides to mix the different price categories, sound quality is literally the only major determinant factor. I don’t know exactly the reason why they award Class A to Schiit Freya+ before the review is up, but the review on Topping Pre90 is up already. You could take probably 30+ minutes’ patience to appreciate how the reviewer stacks up the $17,500 Pass XP32 with $599 Topping Pre90 (both rated class A). I think having such a budgetary class A gear is a win-win situation for the audiophiles who does not have $17,000 disposable money and only cares about the SQ. The end game will be like this: The rich gets expensive Pass, the poor gets economic Topping and both of them enjoy preamp of similar SQ. No discrimination based on the socioeconomic status in the happy music listening wonderland.

A tube preamp without duplicative/reduntant gain...

A preamp is not redundant gain. It is processing the signal and presenting it to the amplifier in a manner that could work better than a signal directly from a source that may or may not match what the amp is looking for. 

The end game will be like this: The rich gets expensive Pass, the poor gets economic Topping and both of them enjoy preamp of similar SQ. No discrimination based on the socioeconomic status in the happy music listening wonderland.

Stereophile says: "Best attainable sound for a component of its kind"...there is the rub, they don't just say best sound period. Your thought is noble but it's still good to be the King and have a large budget for audio. 

I suspect most people on this board haven't heard Schiit products, and don't care for the company's stated mission of providing cost-effective audiophile products. What if Schiit called themselves something more reverential, say "Acoustic Excellence"? And then let's say they chose to sell their product through dealers, so to maintain margins the Freya+ was now a $2,000 preamp. Still a relative bargain in the Class A world, but now with the added benefit of thousands of audiophiles being able to demo the unit for 5 minutes while talking in hushed tones about it's hybrid architecture and flexibility. Would that give it enough credibility for the hi-fi purists to not sniff about assumed mid-fi status?

@mrmojo

I don’t understand your point.

I have a couple of true audiophile systems (see my UserID), I also own three Schiit components and have extensively auditioned another (Yggdrasil, Gungnir… head amp and amp). Never read their stated mission. I resisted auditioning or buying for years because of their name. But they earned consideration by their great performance compared to their cost.

They provide excellent budget high end products (cost effective mid-fi?), whatever you want to call them. They can be worth double or maybe triple the cost for there performance. But they do not outperform Class A products costing $10K or more. I have often heard multiple products from Class A in multiple categories and established in reality the more costly perform at higher levels. In fact, this was one of my first questions decades ago when I started reading Stereophile. I quickly got an answer when I bought an inexpensive Class A rated Phonostage… quickly upgrading up the list of components until I got to a significant level of performance.