Unless you’ve been away from hi-fi for the past few years, you’ve probably heard of Schiit Audio, a high-value brand available at reasonable prices. Over the years, Schiit Audio owner Jason Stoddard and I have talked at trade shows and I recently caught up with Jason to talk about his company.
Oliver Masciarotte: Can you give us a brief intro to you and the company Schiit Audio (www. schiit.com)?
Jason Stoddard: Hey all, maybe a few words to set the scene might be helpful. About eight years ago, I started Schiit Audio with Mike Moffat [founder of Theta Digital and a pioneer in digital audio], initially in one third of our garage. Our original products were a pair of headphone amps—one tube, one solid state. Since then, we’ve been expanding the lineup, down, and sideways—with less expensive products, more expensive products, DACs, and recently, a pair of preamps and a speaker power amp. Today, our line spans products from $49 to $2,399, and our garage has grown to 15,000 square feet of industrial space in Valencia, CA. I do most of the analog design, and Mike does the digital.
My history with audio starts in college, where I made loudspeakers and eventually had a small speaker company, Odeon, which didn’t go very far. From there, I was at Sumo in the Polaris 2/ Andromeda 3/Diana/Theorem/Artemis era, if anyone remembers that. Then, almost two decades as an evil marketer with my own ad agency (Centric/Agency of Change) gets us to the Schiit era.
Masciarotte: What is Schiit’s engineering philosophy?
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