Next up was La Roca from Todd Garfinkle’s MA Recordings. A transient guitar pick in the middle of the song left a bit of a punch in my belly. This was solid state? Garett Brennan’s vocals were smooth and detailed. The opening guitar chords were simply natural and lifelike. Right off we listened to ‘The Dog Song’ from Cookie Marenco’s dynamite Blue Coast Collection SACD sampler. I brought a stack of CDs I was familiar with and Barry has a huge collection and he tossed in a few gems as well. We let it ‘cook’ for an hour and things really got going.īarry and I have a CD collectors’ group in Atlanta so we are ‘old-school digital’ in that regard. The Aegir did not sound all that great at first, but I looked at Barry and said, don’t panic, this amp takes a while to get going. At first, we hooked up the Aegir to the Moab and used an Oppo 105 for digital playback. I like this speaker due to its presence in the midrange and some quite good bass performance. The Moab speakers are fairly wild with what appears to be 15 tweeters in an array but are actually dome radiating drivers in an MTM array providing midrange. Designed and built in California, the Aegir had a very solid feel and was quite heavy.įor sound evaluation, I went over to my friend Barry’s house where highly efficient Tekton Moabs were set up as both a two-channel system and a seven-channel surround system, but we listened in two channel mode only. There are two long and relatively sharp banks of heat dissipation fins running the length of the amplifier, and the amp puts out quite a lot of heat. Speaker terminals appear to be WBT and the banana connectors I used fitted snugly. Gently angled brushed aluminium with an operate button on the front which pulls it out of stand-by mode and an on-off switch in the back. I did not receive a second unit so I listened to the RCAs only. This one comes well packaged and is self-contained for RCA input operation but if you like balanced inputs, there is one balanced input so you have to run mono. But one that costs a mere £800? Hmm, we will see. D’Agastino? Pass Labs? Constellation? Sure. But I do confess that it’s hard for a solid-state amplifier to impress me. Audio Research? Doshi? VAC? It’s all good. I mean I like high quality solid state but give me the midrange of a good neutral tube amplifier any day. So I arranged for some high efficiency speakers to listen to the Aegir at its best.īut first, a caveat. So the bottom line is that we should hear the benefits of Class A but it obviously works its best with very efficient speakers. It’s still a very hot-running amp, though, with over 10W of Class A standing bias.” It also solves the NPN and PNP device mismatch problem, since it uses both NPN and PNP devices on both rails. In their own words, “Technically, Continuity is a way to eliminate transconductance droop outside of the Class A bias region, and extend the benefits of Class A biasing. They came up with a Continuity circuit, based on technology they used in their Lyr 3 headphone amp. The idea here was to make a Class A version of the Vidar, but the story is a little more complicated than that. Power output is 20 watts into 8 ohms or 40 watts into 4 ohms. Luckily I secured two very efficient loudspeakers for the review, the Tekton Designs Moab speaker at 98db efficiency and the JBL L200 which take just one watt (!) to produce 84db of volume.įirst some background on the Aegir amp. I just love what they do to the mids and highs. The Schiit Aegir amp is intriguing because I have always loved the sound of Class A amplifiers. But I was a little hesitant to review the Aegir initially as I don’t exactly have a collection of efficient speakers lying around….but I was curious… ![]() Combined with a Vidar amp for £700 from them, it created a very musical and punchy presentation on my upstairs Wilson Audio TuneTot system. I was especially impressed with their Saga+ preamp that sells for a lowly £390. ![]() I just think what they do to make things affordable is good for the hobby. Schiit Audio has been a favourite brand of mine for some time.
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