Post by kauai82 on Feb 20, 2018 13:31:53 GMT -5
About six months ago I bought from vneal a Schiit Vali 2 as a headphone amp. A shout out to vneal as he is an excellent person to deal with. I love my Vali 2 as a headphone amp that I use in my music room system.. Suddenly in my office system my fairly new Yamaha R-S300 that I bought open boxed and as a store demo and for a great price started to have a hum in it. Luckily it is under warranty and it is in the repair shop as I write this. It will be there for about two weeks to a month ! What to do for tunes in the office ? I decided to take my garage system and put it up in the office. Was using a cheap Chinese tube preamp with 6J1 tubes and a fairly nice vintage Adcom GFA-535 60 watts a channel to power my DIY Core 2 speakers. Was not impressed with the sound quality. I have used the Adcom amp in different setups at different times in the past and knew it was the Chinese preamp that was the weak link. It was going to be a long month till I got the Yamaha back from service I thought. I was surfing different audio sites as I always do and was looking at the Schiit Audio site when I realized that the Vali 2 has outputs and can be used as preamp ! Hooked it up and was astounded with the sound quality of the system. It was really eye opening to see what that little tube headphone/preamp can do. Really made the Core 2's sing. I am now going to sell the Yamaha when it gets back from the shop and start looking for a replacement headphone amp for the music room. Looking at buying another Vali 2 or the new Magi 3 $99 headphone amp. I luckily live fairy close to the Schiit Retail store and can check out the offerings they have. Thinking of buying the Loki sound equalizer also but want to hear it first. If you are looking to get into tubes and afraid of the cost of most tube preamps I think that the Vali 2 would be a great starter preamp. It is a great headphone amp and is very competitively priced new at $149 and you can get one used for about $100-$110 dollars. I very much like the combination of tube preamp and a solid state amp SQ.
