Schiit Magnius headphone amplifier review: Affordable overkill

No need to beat around the bush on this one. The Schiit Magnius doesn’t really make sense for the gaming-centric audience we serve here at Shacknews. It’s not marketed for such purposes and Schiit (as well as many other vendors) have other products more apt for hooking up your gaming headsets. The Magnius is a headphone amplifier designed to do one thing and do it for an extremely fair price — dump a buttload of clean power into any of your audiophile headphones equipped with mini-XLR 4-pin cables. At this task, it performs stupendously while also offering some nice bonuses for users with powered monitors and other dedicated audio playback equipment.

Bigger and blacker

Folks familiar with the products that Schiit has been producing for years will be accustomed to the conventional silver metallic aesthetic the company has used since it launched back in 2010. In recent years, some products have been offered with darker-colored variants, but the Magnius headphone amp comes in every color you could want, so long as it's black. While it is a similar height to the popular Schiit Magni and Asgaard amps, the Magnius needed nearly twice as much width to house its circuit board and components. It is a cosmetic match for Schiit’s new Modius DAC, with the company pitching the pair as an endgame-quality audio stack that can pair well with even the world’s most difficult-to-drive and expensive headphones.

The Magnius offers a pair of line-level RCA stereo inputs as well as a conventional 1/4-inch (6.5mm) headphone output jack. While it works perfectly fine in this configuration, the real attraction is the pair of balanced 3-pin XLR inputs and mini-XLR 4-pin headphone output jack. When paired to a DAC or other source with 3-pin balanced XLR output, the Magnius is capable of delivering enough power to deafen anyone in about 2 seconds. Acquiring permanent hearing loss in this fashion wouldn’t even be that bad because the signal will be so clean. 

Schiit claims that the Magnius is capable of delivering 6000mW (that’s 6 full-fat watts) when presented with a 16-ohm headphone load, 2600mW at 50 ohms, and 500mW at 600 ohms. For reference, the headphone amp in an iPhone produces ~45mW at 16 ohms. The Magnius delivers this power with noise levels that are hilariously lower than the threshold of human hearing and low enough that the noise measurements are nearing the practical limits of most conventional testing equipment. Schiit offers their own testing results and the power claims for the Magnius have also been verified by a third-party source. In the simplest of terms, when fed a clean input signal, the Magnius is capable of blowing you out of your seat (so much as a headphone could do) with pure, unsullied sound.

Rounding out the package is the inclusion of an Alps RK27114 analog potentiometer. Potentiometers handle the volume control of such an amp, where better units offer the best-possible channel balance and total lack of noise. The Alps pot in the Magnius sells for more than $20 wholesale by itself and delivers on the promise of precise channel balance, even at the lowest output levels (an area where all my other amps struggle). The Magnius is designed and built in the USA with domestic parts, save for that pesky wall wart. My biggest gripe with the build of the amp is the wall wart, but corners must be cut somewhere to keep the chassis size down and materials cost under control. An internal power supply would drive up the final price, negating some of the affordable appeal the Magnius brings. 

The amp can also act as a preamp with volume controls for both the single-ended and balanced outputs on the back side of the chassis. I tried out running a set of XLR cables from the Magnius to my M-Audio BX8 powered monitors and within a few minutes of listening, my face was locked into an ultra-smarmy grin, much like you would see from one Pepe the Frog. The Magnius was a clear upgrade as a simple volume controller over what I have been using, but buying this headphone amp just to have a good volume knob for my monitors would be super-wasteful. Thankfully, the outstanding headphone amp circuitry attached to the volume controller on the Magnius makes such a purchase a real necessity for me (this is how I talk myself into buying things I don’t actually need instead of saving for retirement).

When matched against my other headphone amps, I did notice that I was occasionally hearing mains power noise from the Magnius, particularly when the central AC unit powered up in the house or when the refrigerator compressor cycled into duty. I can’t be certain it is a fault of the Magnius as the same noise was not audible when in preamp mode with my monitors. It could be the mini-XLR 4-pin output of the amp or simply the balanced headphone cables I have on hand. 

As the only units I had with me sporting balanced input capability, most of my listening was done with the Sennheiser HD650, Sennheiser HD6XX, and Hifiman HE4XX. This is the first amplifier I’ve owned that could drive the Sennheisers to uncomfortable output levels without needing to be put into high-gain mode. Power is available for days. The total lack of noise meant that I was only hearing my music and the headphones, as the amp itself does nothing to color the sound. 

For testing, I paired my SMSL SU-8 DAC to the Schiit Magnius via 3-pin XLR balanced outputs. The pair performed wonderfully together save for the fact that their XLR jacks are on opposite sides of each other, meaning my fancy 6-inch XLR cables were worthless unless I positioned the units perpendicular to each other. I am now staring at the Schiit product page for the matching Modius balanced DAC with a sweaty brow. My current setup works and sounds great, but how much cooler would it be if all the parts were a cosmetic match?

Who needs this?

The Schiit Magnius does what it advertised to do with almost no heat output and no additional noise. It is a product made in the USA that delivers unmatched performance at a previously unmatched price. Does it make sense for those who aren’t waist-deep into the audiophile headphone hobby? Not at all. Is it cool? Hell yeah, brother. If you have headphones that need loads of power and can be hooked up to a balanced amp, you could do much worse than the Schiit Magnius and spend way more money doing so. 8/10 signs of permanent hearing loss

This review is based on a sample provided by the manufacturer. The Magnus headphone amplifier is available directly from Schiit for $199

Chris Jarrard

Contributing Tech Editor

Chris Jarrard likes playing games, crankin' tunes, and looking for fights on obscure online message boards. He understands that breakfast food is the only true food. Don't @ him.