OK, I am going to do a full reset on this plan!!! The effort was never meant to see if tiny audible differences exist in amps. It is about verifying what he is saying in his video. And there, he goes a million times past this boundary. I am going to show a transcript I took just now of his video and let that sink in and then I will talk about what we need to do to deal with his assertions:
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Getting a $200 amp for a $600 amp you should probably reevaluate your chain (chuckle).
The
dynamic range feels quite compressed…. A bit of caricature of Schiit house sound.
Mentions Only I track from Skinny Living: The loud stuff sounds like what should be but the quiet stuff sounds like it is pushed up to meet the loud stuff –
everything sounds like it has roughly the same volume. It takes a lot of delicacy of music.
[…] That
doesn’t come across in measurements and I don’t know why. This is not just something I have found; other people have as well.
I don’t get ear fatigue easily….I can listen to Aria on Benchmark AHB2 all day but
within a couple of hours of that – not even that – I was feeling tired [from Schiit Magnius], my ears needed a break. I had to take a break. I could not critically listen. This is a fatiguing amp to me.
There is just a slight graininess and lack of separation that really gets to me.
Plays track from Omnitica (EDM) and says bass is good but
there is not a huge amount of texture; it doesn’t present low-end timbre very well. In fact timbre overall is not great on this amp; that will be a bit of recurring theme.
In the mids is where stuff starts to get a little wonky… mid texture and detail is not good…
Plays Day by Day by Manganas Garden.
The vocals here just lack mid-range energy. They don’t feel like there is any texture or realism to them. [talks about vocal separate heard on AHB2]… but on Magnius is really mediocre. Separation is not a strong point of this.
Treble resolution is odd…. It is really detailed….[plays Enough to Believe from Bob Moses] …
there is slight graininess over it all. The timbre is pretty good… there is a graininess that comes across very aggressively on some tracks. Plays Take What You Want by Will Malone…they just feel a bit dry and grainy. They are detailed but they don’t sound correct. Switched to Benchmark AHB2: suddenly there is texture. There is timbre.
The problem I have with this (Schiit Magnius) is that a lot of times it sounds artificial. The treble is so hit and miss.
Low end could be a little faster but is good for an amp this price. Overall I
have not really enjoyed the sound of this amp. And I don’t mean it is not as good as Benchmark AHB2…
I mean it [Schiit Magnius] is not a good amp at this price. Even when I switch to an amp like
JDS Atom… absolutely nothing special (it is a $100 amp), and that sounds a lot better on this track (Take What You Want). It is
not as detailed of an amp but it doesn’t have that aggression, it doesn’t have that congestion in the mids. The overall presentation I like better on JDS Atom than [Schiit Magnius]. Both measure excellently so objectively is not too much of a debate but this [Schiit Magnius] feels compressed, forced, the single ended output should not exist, it is just bad.
The low-end is soft, unresolving, it is kind of muddy, the low-end output is just not good.
He talks about GoldPoint volume control he is using. It is a passive input selector and volume control (model SA4).
A lot of this I talk about
is not Schiit’s fault. Let’s talk about measurements. Measurements can absolutely tell you if something is bad….. All of these measure great but sound different (points to a few amps). Measurements don’t tell the full story and there are a couple of problems to them.
First is places like Audio Science Review don’t do consistent testing. If you look at the measurements for this [Magnius] they don’t include intermodulation distortion… that is odd because IMD/intermodulation distortion is much more audible than harmonic distortion. It should be included because by Schiit’s own measurements IMD is higher than THD….
I dislike that Audio Science Review don’t include the same test for each of their products. They [Audio Science Review] frequency miss out things that most people consider important and they only include tests that fit whatever story they want to tell, be it good or bad.
The
second part is that Audio Science Review don’t include music. Actual music is not a sine wave (funny there that MQA he tested with such test tones!). There are a lot of topologies that manufactures can implement that measure well but don’t sound good.
A real-world example of this is
nested feedback which is not what this [Magnius] is using… but Magni Heresey is using. That’s where you have a lots of op-amps that have feed forward correction (!) and so for a repeating steady state signal, a sine wave, that’s no problem. As soon
as you throw music at it with transients, it struggles. A similar thing happens in real life with active noise cancelling headphones…. The same thing can happen with some amp topologies.
Jason from Schiit Audio spoken at a couple of interviews how when Audio Science Review started to trash their low-end… people stopped buying their low-end products, their sales plummeted.
Most people don’t know how to read measurements… Schiit was forced to change how they make products… doesn’t matter if they think it is good…People buy what measures well don’t care how it sounds and that is how we wound up with Schiit Magnius.
I don’t like this Amp very much [Magnius]. It is pretty fatiguing, glarry and aggressive at times…but it almost doesn’t matter because people are just going by the measurements even though measurements don’t tell the whole story. And I think that is bad.
People ask how do you know it is not placebo. How do you know you are not just imagining the difference….
The answer is that you can prove it… I have a video coming that is doing just that.
I have taken a bunch of DACs and I have done steady state measurements like Audio Science Review as well as null tests with actual music and showing what the differences are there and the results from that has been very interesting…. Says nulls [between DACs] agree with his listening impressions.
If you want something better, get Asgard 3 from Schiit. It is a discrete amp and no feedback trickery as well so sounds a lot better.
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I don't think you could murder everything about audio science any better than he did in that review! There is a lot to parse here but to the point of testing, I have a good idea on how to proceed.