In December 2011 Mike Moffat walked up to Jason Stoddard holding a small circuit board. It became the Modi, a DAC, the box that turns digital music files into a signal an amplifier can play. Stoddard told John Darko, "I thought it sounded so good that I decided to design a small amp to go with it." That amp became the Magni, and the two stacked on a desk are what people now call a Schiit stack. Schiit designs its own circuits and sells them direct, with no dealer in between. Its bigger True Multibit DACs turn each digital sample straight into a voltage, using chips that Mark Phillips of SoundStage! Access notes are more often found in MRI units than in audio gear. Schiit suits listeners who want to start small and move up without a dealer.

A Magni and Modi stack is the usual first step. The next step is the Asgard, which John Grandberg of Darko Audio calls possibly one of Schiit's most significant headphone amplifiers, with a presentation that "sounds close-to-neutral" with a lean toward warmth. John Darko gave the Jotunheim an award and wrote, "If you have the cash, the Jotunheim is where you start." It has plenty of power for big headphones, yet Darko ran sensitive custom in-ear monitors on it at low gain with no hiss. Both amps take an optional DAC card, so one box can do the whole job. For speakers, the Freya+ preamp has a passive mode that Kalman Rubinson of Stereophile heard as "clean and uncolored." Match the power amp to your speakers. Steve Guttenberg ran the 10-watt Gjallarhorn with efficient Klipsch RP-600M II speakers and said, "This is high-end sound, high-end to me." For playing loud he picks the 100-watt Vidar 2.

Stoddard and Moffat started Schiit in June 2010. Stoddard had worked at Sumo and designed Theta's Cobalt 307 DAC. Moffat had designed for Theta Digital, where Phillips says he "basically created the DAC as a standalone audio component." The name comes from Stoddard always having Schiit to do, Stoddard's book Schiit Happened says, and the first products were the Asgard and Valhalla headphone amplifiers. Darko reviewed the Modi in 2013 and wrote "Everyone should own one. Everyone CAN own one." Chris Martens of The Absolute Sound reports that when Stoddard showed his engineers the circuit behind the 2016 Jotunheim, many said "that could never work," and he pointed to prototypes already running in the lab. Chassis and transformers are made in California and boards in Texas, and the company's story on Head-Fi is more than 200,000 words long. At the top of the line, the Yggdrasil DAC became Herb Reichert's "first true reference DAC" at Stereophile.