Oh Boy Schiit Announces 10 Tube Headphone Amp for $1799.00

I saw a picture of it but why does it need 10 tubes?  Are they more for show?

I guess this is why

“Folkvangr is completely bonkers,” Jason Stoddard, Schiit’s co-founder and head of analog development, said. “There’s no other way to put it. There’s no reason for a 10-tube amp that dissipates 100 watts at idle, to produce only about a watt or so at its best. It measures very badly, and it’s not what we’d use for any kind of IEM. But it’s the answer to a question that’s bugged me for years–what do tubes really sound like–and, at least to me, it sounds very good.”

This looks like an OTL design. You need to parallel enough tubes to get a low output impedance (the purpose of an output transformer in conventional tube designs).

Even on a good day, I'm far from a Schiit fanboy. But this is cool! It's a fairly novel offering in the market. 

OTL tube headphones amps have been around for ages, and its pain points have always been limited applicability (due to high output impedance) and the resultant sound quality's extreme dependence on choice of output capacitors - where extremely large capacitance values AND high voltage ratings are required for the role. Many simply resort to using electrolytic output caps due to cost and size considerations. 

Schiit seems to have satisfactorily addressed both of these points.