Schiit Freya + Class A in Stereophile

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. 

I've seen preamps like topping come and go, but in 10-20 years nobody will be trying to buy a topping because they will know better.

@invalid

+1 and Audio Research, Conrad Johnson, Pass, and other truly high end companies will still be there. Pushing the envelope, improving the sound that is possible. 

lanx003: The Class A rating was in an issue where the Freya + was actually reviewed, but you likely know that. I've had the original version of the Freya since it first came out years ago and have raved about it, and noted that I'd compared it to much more expensive preamps (including my own). It's utterly a steal even today, and somehow the thing had really never had much audio geek press (in the audio mags I read anyway.)  I bet the reviewer would have appreciated the tube stage if it had better tubes (I stuck some new Tung Sols in mine and thought they weren't nearly as good as NOS GEs). The Topping seems fine but the Freya still does far more...including tubes. It will likely always suffer from being too inexpensive for some.