Most Solid State Class A amplifiers have a sound which achieves a certain level of neutrality of tone, but never crosses over into the truly organic and fluid sound of tube amplifiers. It does not sound like First Watt or Pass Labs amps, nor does it share much in common with Krell or D’Agostino. There is underneath all of this an interesting quality to the amp. Despite this, and even with very efficient speakers, I hear the frequency extremes being slightly rolled off, a little warm in the top, a little less than totally subterranean in the low end. The auditory image is stable, tactile and all the things the Vidar is not. On a more careful listen however, it presents bass which is coherent and seems to glue itself to the signal, a slightly silky and smooth top end and mids that are rich and dense. It’s a great amp, but it speaks to the head.Īegir meanwhile dispenses with any wow factor straight out of the gate, and might at first seem underwhelming.
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But images don’t resolve themselves as transparently as the Aegir, nor are textures particularly rich or involving. There’s a slight silvery quality, a sharpness and ‘look at me’ sound, that draws my attention to how tight the bass is, or how clear the midrange is. Whereas the Vidar has dynamics, slam and bandwidth, the Aegir takes the lighter, more invisible approach.Įven with very inefficient speakers, I can never quite shake the sound of the Vidar. While I won’t go as far as to call it tube-like, this amp does channel a coherence and warmth that is quite pleasing, and if you’re coming from other solid state amplifiers, this quality may surprise you with how musically engaging it is. What I found when paired correctly though is that there is a luminous warmth to the Schiit Aegir.
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Something like a Vandersteen or Wilson is not going to be kind to this amp.
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BIAS AMP PRO REVIEW SERIES
Speakers with nice flat 8 ohm curves and steady phase angles will be what you want here, and this fits with the trend of increasingly efficient small towers from Focal Kantas, to Sonus Faber Olymica Novas, to Proac Response series speakers. This amp is most at home with relatively high efficiency speakers, and benign phase angles. The Aegir by comparison is an entirely different animal. Like an F1 car or a thoroughbred stallion, the vidar likes to be driven hard. However, the amp with power hungry speakers, or speakers with difficult impedance dips and phase angles will really shine, and I think it even sounds better the more difficult to drive your speakers are. When first firing up the Vidar, if you have high efficiency speakers, you may not be wowed. What is the grand sum of pros and cons here? Vidar Vs. Which sounds better? What type of speaker pairs best. It’s still a very hot-running amp, though, with over 10W of Class A standing bias.”īut still, the proximity of cost for the two amps has spurred countless debates and questions online. It also solves the NPN and PNP device mismatch problem, since it uses both NPN and PNP devices on both rails. Tech speak straight from the site: “Continuity is a way to eliminate transconductance droop outside of the Class A bias region, and extend the benefits of Class A biasing.
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The plussed up feature? A proposed elongation of the class A performance which Schiit calls “Continuity”. The power rating was much lower at stereo 20 watts into 8 ohms, 80 watts mono – and cost an even $100 more. The second option to come from Schiit Audio was the Aegir. The first item out of the gate in the market fight of Vidar vs Aegir was the Schiit Vidar, a solid state class A/B amplifier retailing for $699 (at the time of publishing) with 100 Watts into 8 ohms in stereo and 400 watts in mono. One of these type of questions is the subject of today’s review, and pertains to the somewhat settled product category of budget external power amps from Schiit. This inherent competition often leads to additional burning queries from the market in terms of the inner spaces of the Venn Diagram for any set of closely related gear. According to designer and founder Jason Stoddard, these type of releases are intended to be a version of Mad Max’s Thunderdome fight for survival based on sales (and other factors). For some feature sets there might even be a little bit of overlap. The California and Texas based company offers a wide variety of products to cover a relatively small amount of field. Bopping around the digital space that surrounds Schiit Audio products, one can find a fairly gleeful batch of consumers who are both enthusiastic and loyal to a brand that has really dug into their niche of high ratio bang/buck.