This is a review and detailed measurements of the Schiit Mani 2 phono preamplifier. It was sent to me by the company and costs US $149.
Naturally the unit looks like other Schiit products and seems to even have the previous Mani skin given the lack of "2" designation in the front. Fortunately the back clarifies that:
The transformer buzzed badly when plugged in (easily audible at 4 feet). This was without connecting it to Mani 2 so is an issue with the transformer not having proper mounting (or its quality). Hopefully this is limited to my sample.
There are a lot of configuration switches that are placed underneath:
I don't need to tell you that it is a pain to rotate the unit with cables attached to change settings. I understand the need for circuit optimization and cost to do so but doesn't provide much comfort when it comes to messing with the unit.
Schiit Mani 2 Measurements
Measurements of distortion and noise is a bit of a disaster in phono stages because of lack of standardization in gain and vagaries of ground loop/mains leakage. I used to get around the former by adjusting the input and arriving at a fixed output. Folks complained then that the input voltage was too high relative to output of actual cartridges. So I changed my testing a while back to keep the input fixed at 5 mv for moving magnet and 0.5 millivolt for moving coil. This unfortunately allowed noise to dominate the measurements for the most part, not distortion. Such is the case clearly here:
With no gain switches set, the amplifier gains drops to 30s which is too low relative to its competition. So I chose to use input gain set to High and output set to Low (abbreviated HL). Using that, we see that there is a 60 Hz mains spike that dominates measurements resulting in a SINAD equal to it at around 81 dB. This lands the Mani 2 near the top of our scoreboard:
But due to inaccuracy of the SINAD measurements for the reasons mentioned, the ranking is not quite correct. To wit, Mani 2 has much lower noise than original Mani. Here are its measurements:
Notice how the noise floor past 1 kHz flattens in the original but keeps sloping down in version 2. Original Mani got lucky with lower mains output which boosted its score (with a different gain setting). I played with different gain settings on Mani 2 and what I reported above is the best I could get.
The most important test for a phono stage is how it implements RIAA equalization that is baked into LP format. Here is how Mani 2 performs:
The variation is quite small which is nice (original Mani was also good in this regard).
There are two filter switches provided for rumble/low frequency noise. They are labeled 6 dB and "+6 dB." I could not figure out what the second one meant until I measured it:
The second, +6dB switch does nothing by itself (green line). However, if you activate "6 dB" switch and then toggle that as well, you get a much earlier roll off. Both of these slow filters cut into the frequency response so would be nicer if they had higher slopes and ideally programmable which is not in the cards in this type of product.
To see how much headroom we have with respect to ticks and pops saturating the phono pre-amp, I vary the input to see where the unit clips:
These are fairly low clipping points so best to keep your LPs clean (although improved from Mani).
Changing frequencies instead of level we get much improved response compared to original Mani:
This is Mani:
The SINAD thing was bothering me
, so I ran a sweep versus frequency where only THD is captured (no noise):
This is exceptional level of distortion relative to what is coming from the source so distortion is not a factor. Just worry about mains noise/hum.
Conclusions
Good to see Schiit taking another shot at improving a budget phono stage which was already very good especially in its price class. In every way that I can see, Mani 2 outperforms the original while keeping the cost so reasonable.
I am going to put Schiit Mani 2 on my recommended list.
-----------
As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.
Any donations are much appreciated using: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/
Naturally the unit looks like other Schiit products and seems to even have the previous Mani skin given the lack of "2" designation in the front. Fortunately the back clarifies that:
The transformer buzzed badly when plugged in (easily audible at 4 feet). This was without connecting it to Mani 2 so is an issue with the transformer not having proper mounting (or its quality). Hopefully this is limited to my sample.
There are a lot of configuration switches that are placed underneath:
I don't need to tell you that it is a pain to rotate the unit with cables attached to change settings. I understand the need for circuit optimization and cost to do so but doesn't provide much comfort when it comes to messing with the unit.
Schiit Mani 2 Measurements
Measurements of distortion and noise is a bit of a disaster in phono stages because of lack of standardization in gain and vagaries of ground loop/mains leakage. I used to get around the former by adjusting the input and arriving at a fixed output. Folks complained then that the input voltage was too high relative to output of actual cartridges. So I changed my testing a while back to keep the input fixed at 5 mv for moving magnet and 0.5 millivolt for moving coil. This unfortunately allowed noise to dominate the measurements for the most part, not distortion. Such is the case clearly here:
With no gain switches set, the amplifier gains drops to 30s which is too low relative to its competition. So I chose to use input gain set to High and output set to Low (abbreviated HL). Using that, we see that there is a 60 Hz mains spike that dominates measurements resulting in a SINAD equal to it at around 81 dB. This lands the Mani 2 near the top of our scoreboard:
But due to inaccuracy of the SINAD measurements for the reasons mentioned, the ranking is not quite correct. To wit, Mani 2 has much lower noise than original Mani. Here are its measurements:
Notice how the noise floor past 1 kHz flattens in the original but keeps sloping down in version 2. Original Mani got lucky with lower mains output which boosted its score (with a different gain setting). I played with different gain settings on Mani 2 and what I reported above is the best I could get.
The most important test for a phono stage is how it implements RIAA equalization that is baked into LP format. Here is how Mani 2 performs:
The variation is quite small which is nice (original Mani was also good in this regard).
There are two filter switches provided for rumble/low frequency noise. They are labeled 6 dB and "+6 dB." I could not figure out what the second one meant until I measured it:
The second, +6dB switch does nothing by itself (green line). However, if you activate "6 dB" switch and then toggle that as well, you get a much earlier roll off. Both of these slow filters cut into the frequency response so would be nicer if they had higher slopes and ideally programmable which is not in the cards in this type of product.
To see how much headroom we have with respect to ticks and pops saturating the phono pre-amp, I vary the input to see where the unit clips:
These are fairly low clipping points so best to keep your LPs clean (although improved from Mani).
Changing frequencies instead of level we get much improved response compared to original Mani:
This is Mani:
The SINAD thing was bothering me
, so I ran a sweep versus frequency where only THD is captured (no noise):This is exceptional level of distortion relative to what is coming from the source so distortion is not a factor. Just worry about mains noise/hum.
Conclusions
Good to see Schiit taking another shot at improving a budget phono stage which was already very good especially in its price class. In every way that I can see, Mani 2 outperforms the original while keeping the cost so reasonable.
I am going to put Schiit Mani 2 on my recommended list.
-----------
As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.
Any donations are much appreciated using: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/
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