Does Anyone Buy Schiit for the Sake of Schiit?

@dancarlson10 what I took away was an edgy grainy coarse bright sound that made string instruments sound metallic, almost as if their gut strings they were playing on were made of plastic. Honestly I couldn’t wait to get it out of my system.

"there are fundamental problems in Schiit multibit DACs when it comes to doing what they are told to do: convert digital samples faithfully to analog. Whether we use balanced or unbalanced output, problems remain. And not just in one measurement but practically everywhere we look."

So, your subjective assessment is in line with what Amir concludes about Yggdrasil v2 based on the measurements of a few key parameters. I’m not surprised, but some audiophiles may prefer to cross a busy intersection at peak hour before consulting with ASR.

A lot of time and effort goes into their stuff and the main two guys have many years of experience in the business. In my experience most of the people who bash them do so because of the price to quality myth. Humans usually equate higher prices with better and that's not always true. They do almost everything themselves and don't have to worry about markup from distributors and then retailers so they can keep the prices low.

Keep in mind that most audio stuff is marked up at least 100% from it's production cost so a piece of Schiit that sells for $250 is equivalent to something that would sell for $500 from a retail store and probably more if it's tarted up like Dagostino or similar.

I own a couple of Magni 3 headphone amps that are excellent, an original Freya, the more recent version of which got a "class A" rating in Stereophile, a Bifrost 2, 2 Loki EQs...all extremely well designed and utterly high end, except for their cost...if this stuff wasn't great sounding I'd send it back.

If one’s budget is $250 for a headphone amp, it certainly appears Schiit has come to the rescue. 

@mrskeptic They do almost everything themselves and don’t have to worry about markup from distributors and then retailers so they can keep the prices low.

This does present something of a conundrum to posh retailers who have stuff on their shelves with bone crunching price tags that need to be sold - would they dare to stock Schiit even if they could? Customers may find that they prefer Schiit if they audition. Ouch.

Isn’t competition a beautiful thing?

Yes, Schiit have very experienced and highly reputable engineers on board. I suspect this may be a recent (last couple years or so) development.  That Yggy thing I mentioned a few posts above was June 2018 - that was then, this is now.