Back to the Future with Love, Sex, War and Death... the Schiit Freya is here

[JonMarsh]

The Freya by Schiit Audio is an anachronism and a marvelous melding of different levels of functionality in a ludicrously inexpensive line stage preamp for the 21st century.

It's a passive preamp, using a digital encoder to control a precision relay and resistor based volume control, featuring 128 steps of 0.625 dB, with no active electronics in the signal path.

It's an active buffered preamp, able to drive long cables using JFET active buffers to be able to deliver claimed THD+N in the 0.001% range at 2VRMS output, and IMD under 0.0015% using passive distortion cancellation circuits. Same precision volume control.

It's a thoroughly modern tube preamp, with BALANCED inputs and outputs as well as single ended, using rather large 6SN7 dual triodes (a throwback to my youth) with 14 dB of gain, and rated at less than 0.01% THD+N, with low impedance cathode follower outputs.

Oh, did I mention it also has a remote control? No, it's not a nice milled aluminum jobbie- (like the one with my Halcro) but it has the necessary functions, and is nice and small...

What's not to like? This is such a nutty combination I couldn't resist buying one to test and listen too, even though I have my AURALiC Taurus Pre on hand, as well as a fully functional Halcro DM10. That's scary competition to go up against, as the only other high end tube preamp recently checked out (Ayon) did not make it past the initial screening. I think what really pushed me over the top is that there isn't just one balanced input, but two!

Mine arrived yesterday- BTW, this is no lightweight piece of sheet metal- I was surprised at how heavy the box was, but then there are real power supplies in this thing, including a 300V rail for the vacuum tube stages.

Stay tuned, and check back- it's going to burn in for a while, go through some listening checks, then it will be On the Bench shortly...

[Finleyville]

opcorn:

[TEK]

Didn't take you for a tube man...:tube:
opcorn:

[JonMarsh]

Finley? Or me? I started in electronics when there was essentially nothing but tubes... all my amateur radio gear when I was a kid (10-13) was tube- my guitar amps were tube, (like I mentioned, I was doing stuff with 6SN7's back in the 60's) and I've built and owned Dynaco tube preamps and amps... and Traynors... and Marshalls (still have two) and Line6 tube amps.

OTOH, I've listened to a fair amount of tube gear that was just coloration generators- guitar amps are supposed to do that, HiFi isn't. Well, so says I... let's face it, we do this all for our own amusement, and if a vintage tube hi fi amp with 0.1% distortion amuses one, that's your own business...

I'm curious to see what my reaction is to this unit (soon, hopefully, maybe next weekend) on the bench and otherwise. But the tube part here is an OPTION- you can use it as a pure passive preamp with a great high precision volume control, or as a JFET buffered passive preamp with fairly low distortion (claimed) also.

And having two balanced inputs and a set of balanced outputs is NOT something you ever found on a Dynaco Preamp, nor on their spiritual successor, Van Alstine audio.

[TEK]

Finley? Or me? I started in electronics when there was essentially nothing but tubes... all my amateur radio gear when I was a kid (10-13) was tube- my guitar amps were tube, (like I mentioned, I was doing stuff with 6SN7's back in the 60's) and I've built and owned Dynaco tube preamps and amps... and Traynors... and Marshalls (still have two) and Line6 tube amps.

OTOH, I've listened to a fair amount of tube gear that was just coloration generators- guitar amps are supposed to do that, HiFi isn't. Well, so says I... let's face it, we do this all for our own amusement, and if a vintage tube hi fi amp with 0.1% distortion amuses one, that's your own business...

I'm curious to see what my reaction is to this unit (soon, hopefully, maybe next weekend) on the bench and otherwise. But the tube part here is an OPTION- you can use it as a pure passive preamp with a great high precision volume control, or as a JFET buffered passive preamp with fairly low distortion (claimed) also.

And having two balanced inputs and a set of balanced outputs is NOT something you ever found on a Dynaco Preamp, nor on their spiritual successor, Van Alstine audio.

Yes, you!
As you mentioned, tube amps might have some coloration - and my impression is that you are searching for a pure, clean recreation of the original signal. Thus - did not take you for a tube guy :-)
However, not in the sence that you have not heard or owned tube gear before.

This is however just my impression from reading between the lines of various post.
It might very well be a misintepretation based on context and that you actually love tubes (and coloration) in different context.
What I have heard about tubes is that many like them and that some claim/belive that they are better soundwise not because they do not have coloration, but because the way any coloration is added by tubes are more pleasent (naturally created) than those of digital sources, and therefor is more pleasing to the eare.

[JonMarsh]

Classically, much earlier tube gear was much better than it's solid state contemporaries because of lack of TIMD (Transient Intermodulation Distortion) and other forms of high order distortion, which are quite a bit more subjectively objectionable and easier to hear and detect, to boot. A lot of solid state gear has gotten past that- some fairly completely, some not so completely. A look at the distortion products on a scope from many AB amplifiers will explain that quickly...

Solid state gear suffered because of less intrinsic linearity of the devices, and because of the application of large amounts of NFB to reduce the "numbers", which unfortunately has the side effect of pushing the distortion energy in to the high harmonics, where it is quite objectionable.

Then you saw a lot of effort with companies like Ayre Acoustics and Theta Digital to select devices and topologies in solid state that didn't use overall loop feedback and got distortion numbers similar to vacuum tube, and sonics with the same character. I'd personally say that the effort put into linearization was a good thing- but tossing out NFB loop control completely may have been throwing out the baby with the bath water. I've been down that road myself, doing some outside work, and found it amusing to see Ayre implement some circuits I'd been using a while back in the 2000's, and even more recently, with the Diamond output stage, which I first used in the 70's. those are good techniques- but I think with 12-15 dB of feedback, they'd be even better.

For tube amps, implementing feedback around a power transformer is fairly difficult, which is why there have been a spate of transformer less designs over the years. But Tubes just don't really have the current drive and operating architecture to make that feasible.

Note, the 6SN7 used in the Freya is a MUCH larger dual triode than you typically see in preamps (12AX7, 12AT7, etc) and it is capable of some fairly signifiant class A operation as an output buffer.

[Supernova]

What happened to the Schiit Freya review or is it hiding somewhere on the forum?

[wkhanna]

Jon has been extremely busy as of late.
i am sure we will get his feedback at some point in the near future.

patience being a virtue & all........

[bigburner]

Patience is a virtue,
Possess it if you can,
Seldom found in woman,
Never found in man.

Well that's what my mother told me when I was growing up and she's never wrong.

Nigel.

[Wayman]

My father also told me that patience was a virtue: patient men have long term relationships; impatient men much shorter.

Cheers, Wayne

Patience is a virtue,
Possess it if you can,
Seldom found in woman,
Never found in man.

Well that's what my mother told me when I was growing up and she's never wrong.

Nigel.

[JonMarsh]

My feedback right now is that I'm still working 7 very full days a week at the moment, and this will continue until around mid April... Scheisse! or rather, Schiit!

Yesterday evening was the first presentation of the 2nd webinar in a three part series to teams in Asia; Europe this morning, then Asia again tonight. Then developing the 3rd part. Oh, and I have new customer support assignments in the North central and North East part of the US which is new from two weeks ago....

At least I wasn't one of the two guys laid off yesterday, one just two cubes away from my cubicle...

Hang in there....

[BobEllis]

Gotta love that corporate attitude - "we're barely keeping up with the staff we've got, it must mean the head count is too high."

My company had the attitude that if you need more people, hire them. Then it was sold. Hey, your head count is way higher than industry norms. But we are also more than twice as profitable as industry norms. The first time I tried to make a case for adding another employee that would have allowed us to make double the employee cost more profit I was told to let two people go. They were bankrupt within a few years.

Hope they don't burn you out completely, Jon. Darn those golden handcuffs.

[JonMarsh]

Thanks for the words of empathy and wisdom.

The official word is that this wasn't done for economics, but as part of a re-structuring to obtain higher efficiency. (amazing what kind of verbiage these guys can come up with- must be part of the search requirements to fulfill those management positions).


Overall, this has a bit of history, as many of these things do. And it actually affected the core group I'm in, because we had a guy working with us half time *(that used to be a report of mine 10-12 years ago) who was doing some very good deep side work for our team, officially half time for us, (this is the guy who now has my Wavecor Ardents) and now he's been yanked back to work full time in his team doing FAE support- something he can do in his sleep.

But as I mentioned, there's a story behind that, as about 9 months ago, the FAE who was doing a bang up job on that support issue was laid off along with the FAE manager that hired him. And that happened even though they needed another guy to work with him- and in fact he'd interviewed just the week before a guy who ended up getting hired two weeks later as his replacement.

However, as any one with a modicum of experience in the real world knows, you don't bring in someone brand new on a complex digital platform for server VRD systems and expect them to be as productive as someone who's been on board and doing this for several years- unless of course, you're one of the brains dead managers responsible for that screwing around.

Well, the new guy could tell after a while that the fix was in, and he was being given a different job in essence than what he'd applied for, so he quit and left as soon as he could find a new job somewhere else. Eventually they got someone else in, and as he was working rather behind the curve, too, they switched my long time friend's role to supporting this customer, and also took half of one one technician away from the four AE's he's supposed to support in our office/lab and gave it to this one customer support center.

And this, with the new rule that we actually needed to supply with the letter of the law, in that contract temps are actually supposed to be temps; so we let go the technicians last December that had been working for us as contract employees for a number of years, and now we just have newbie techs without experience with what we do, and we have to cycle them through every 12 months, so they'll never get much experience or training, because lord only knows, we CAN'T hire a real employee technician who might have to have benefits and would be 3-4X more productive, like the technical I had reporting to me from 1988 to 2007.


OK, I think I've vented enough this morning. My manager and I had a bit of a nose to nose session last Tuesday, and that was before this latest bit of nonsense was announced.

Again, it was all about planning and lack there of (his part), resources, and lack thereof (our part), and the fact that I may have let some of that information slip to a rep FAE that I've been working with on customer projects on and off for 20 years... this was over the fact that in order to be able to test some hardware for them, for a new high ASP customer opportunity, I ordered (on eBay) a Chroma Power test fixture out of my own pocket, explaining that our purchasing processes take so long these days it could be 3 weeks before they even place an order once I put in a PO (true- had recent example to back up that assertion).

This manager felt that he and our VP have treated our team very well on resources, by agreeing to spend 70K on upgrading four test benches two years ago, and actually only took 18 months to implement it. I countered with the fact that I spent enough to buy a nice Tesla last fiscal year from my own pocket on test equipment, hardware, and software- $85K- and would he like to sit down and review it in black and white, as I have the information in my end of year review binder which he didn't want to look at because he didn't do the review dialog for me when he was supposed to, last October, and skipped it until all the paperwork had been done and finalized and info being sent out to employees (end of December). (an HR No-No).

Ok, done venting. Yes, golden handcuffs indeed, I figure I can power through whatever comes up between now and the end of calendar 2018... of course, when I leave, he will have to nearly build the resources for my position from scratch, as so much of how I actually do my work (computers, test equipment, etc) is actually my own, not the company's. He knows this, in a sense, but perhaps not the degree. he doesn't really want to know it, you know. :B

[JonMarsh]

Back on Track

Oh, and BTW, regarding the Freya...

I did pick up a dedicated storage bin to use with the Freya, so that I can keep it in the mancave, even while not using or testing it-

And if things go well in getting chores done (like moving out the old refrigerator to measure the space available exactly for a new one (probably that Australian brand) and getting the progress I need on the next webinar by lunch time on Sunday, then in the afternoon I'll pull out the Freya and start getting some measurements on the bench. Who knows, may get some measurements on the Soekeris DAC, too- after a fashion, have to use a high quality signal generator program on my MacBook Pro to do that- not really sure how well that will work, for doing FFT and other measurements, but we'll take a crack at it.


For now, I'm thinking that if I can make room to set it up, I may have a man cave system that is the MacBook Pro driving the Soekeris, which in turn will go into the Freya, which in turn will be connected to the NAD M22, driving a pair of Wharfdale REVA-2's I have (long story). I mean, I COULD hook up the Halcro stuff, which is currently stored in the man cave too (and that's a problem- lacking room) but it seems like overkill for the Reva-2's, interesting as they are for a small commercial speaker. (you may wonder why I didn't just build something similar, but doing that requires spare time- haven't had any to speak of since November- no progress on any ongoing audio projects)

[Supernova]

Jeopardy theme song in my head because of this thread. I'm 90% sure I'm picking up a Freya and yggi but still would like to read your thoughts Jon.

I hope all is well.

[JonMarsh]

It's been a crazy year... so much stuff to process, not all of it going well. The trip to Idaho was fairly interesting, and with catching up on some things at home, I plan to break out the test gear again pretty soon, for the Freya, the new "big" Soekris DAC, and the new Vidar, which went on order last week. This could be a good combo for those on a budget who want as much as possible the sound of real music.

Hopefully this won't take too long...