Schiit amps, freya preamp

Their amps are somewhat gutless so unless you’re running 90+db speakers I’d go elsewhere. Preamps are decent but not spectacular. They are comparatively inexpensive however.

I have to take issue with the comments above, which is flat wrong.  Schiit makes fantastic amps and preamps.  The Vidar will drive anything in stereo mode, and plenty of people use two of them as mono blocks.  The Aegir was listed on Stereophile's A listing, which is a very exclusive award.  The Aegir, being 20 wpc,  is more suited for more efficient speakers and such, depending on whether you want rock concert levels or more reasonable uses.


The Freya+ is a major accomplishment for its sound quality.  Being that it also has tubes and passive modes and true balanced inputs/outputs basically turns the audio industry on its head.  Find any preamp that has this fully balanced circuitry, then look at the price.

The Vidar has MANY issues with going into protection when speakers run below 4 ohms. There are countless threads to back this up. The Aegir is a lower power, sort of class a but not really that can’t drive anything challenging. 
Neither will power magneplanars well. This has also been well documented. If an amp manufacturer doesn’t want to tell you what topology it is - run. Run away and take your money with you.

As for preamps, the Freya has good specs but has a host of issues that spans all of its revisions. Thought it has improved many still find the chassis rings, also gets hot, loose single ended connections, supplied tubes are unusable, and the volume ticking sound, which is a “feature”. The Saga is a solid state preamp with a tube buffer. It seems to be ok for what it is and what it costs.

very happy with Vidar with Magnepan LRS in small room...just purchased an original Saga pre and after a few days think it’s a great pre for the price...Vidar and Saga used in different systems

I'm pretty sure the Freya+ isn't fully balanced. It converts balanced to single-ended and back to balanced on the outputs. It's still a nice preamp for the money.

I owned one of the original Freya preamps for a little while and thought it had a nice sound with good channel-to-channel volume tracking. Some people might be annoyed by the loud relay clicking when the volume is changed.

I replaced it with a Parasound JC-2 which is admittedly quite a bit more expensive, but was also a nice step up in sound quality.