November 10, 2020, Valencia, CA. Schiit Audio announced the Vali 2+ hybrid headphone amplifier and preamp, pushing the price/performance ratio for affordable tube amplifiers to a new height. Offering higher power and lower noise than its predecessor, Vali 2+ provides a great way for customers to experience true tube performance, without breaking the bank. Vali 2+ retains the same price of its predecessor, and, like all Schiit products, it is designed and built in California.

“Vali 2, the predecessor to Vali, was introduced almost 5 years ago,” said Jason Stoddard, Schiit Audio’s Co-Founder. “It’s been a great little amp. Tons of people have gotten their first experience with tubes with Vali 2, because it’s a versatile, affordable product. Now, we’re upping the performance pretty significantly–offering 50% more power, and almost 10dB lower noise floor than the original.”

The higher power and lower noise floor mean Vali 2+ is better-suited for a wide range of headphones, including hard-to-drive planar magnetic designs, and sensitive IEMs. In terms of distortion performance, though, Schiit is clear:

“Vali 2+ is not a low-distortion design,” explains Jason Stoddard. “It is designed to reflect the distortion of its tube gain stage, so total distortion is high, but it also falls off sharply for higher orders. The distortion performance is better than Vali 2, yes, but we’re still talking 1000x to 10000x higher distortion than our low-distortion amps like Magni and Magnius.”

The primary performance differences between Vali 2 and Vali 2+ come from the inclusion of a driver stage, and matched, paired devices used in the output stage. This allows the amplifier’s Coherence™ tube/transistor hybrid gain stage to be more free from output stage loading, which more accurately reflects the tube’s performance. That, together with increased power supply filtering and some gain optimization, result in an amplifier with an even lower noise floor as well.

For convenience, Vali 2+ retains Vali 2’s single-tube design, which allows owners to easily and inexpensively experiment with different types of tubes, and also its preamp outputs, which allows the owner to connect the amp to a set of desktop powered monitors or a speaker power amp to create a complete desktop system. A gain switch also provides more flexibility for hard-to-drive and insensitive headphones.

Like all Schiit products, Vali 2+ uses quality parts throughout, including a selected, custom-taper Alps potentiometer, Nichicon audio-spec capacitors, and precision thin-film resistors. All voltage rails are fully regulated, and the power supply is 100% linear, with no switching supplies anywhere inside or outside the chassis.

A NOS (new old stock) tested, matched 6BZ7 tube is supplied with every Vali 2+ so that customers can get started listening right away, but Vali 2+ also will accept many tube types, including 6922, ECC88, 6CG7, 6N1P, amongst others.

Also like all Schiit products, Vali 2+ is designed and built in California (really), with our chassis and PC boards being made by companies only minutes away from our Valencia office.

Vali 2+ is soon available for order on schiit-europe.com