My Topping D30 arrived this evening via UPS from Parts Express. I will spare you the unboxing video. However, the unit was very warm out of the box, so I hope the UPS driver was well hydrated.
I connected it to my hi-fi, flicked the on switch and nothing happened. Thats because I forgot to connect the 15v dc switching power supply first. Ok, now it works. I was immediately transported to the Bifrost at Asgard... Not really, but there are a few Marvel/Thor movies if you are into that.
Instead of the supplied USB interconnect, I used the one which comes with an Audioengine D1. It is 2' long, looks well shielded, and has gold plated connectors. They sell it for $40, so it obviously must have magical properties.
Subjective evaluation methodology:
2 oz bourbon on the rocks, finish and repeat. I feel sorry for Europeans, because it is very difficult for them to buy American whiskey.
SQ: hints of raspberry, tobacco, tannin, citrus and arsenic. OK, most subjective impressions are BS. The Audioengine D1 I pulled out of the system was fairly new. It doesn't work at 88.2 (as advertised) with JRiver on WASAPi, or on a Mac. Perhaps the 2012 USB code is out of date. It always sounded a little dull compared to other dac's I had around here. Then again, my Grace M9xx didn't sound right on speakers until I turned down the hardware volume control 6db from what is supposed to be neutral. It kicks ass with headphones. Go figure. Anyway, the D30 sounds fine. It only cost $120, parts express has a 45 day return policy, and lots of people like it. This is a low risk deal. Think of all those poor schmucks who bought Yaggi's after reading reviews written from golden eared monkeys...
Some serious objective observations. The D30 is well behaved. There are no noticeable clicks or pops when rebooting my Win 10 computer. I only tried a short term sleep and wake, no pop. However, long term sleep might be different. Very tiny clicks when changing bitrates in JRiver, none noticed in foobar2000. I used to have a loud click switching from WASAPI audio programs to VLC (it's DS). That's gone with the D30. Apparently, the D30 has an internal hardware volume control. The Win 10 volume control works when using WASAPI. There is a blue power LED which is barely visible even with the lights off. The red unlock LED only comes on when rebooting the computer. Turning the amp off and on did not crash the DAC. I have not tried sending DSD to the DAC, but that's academic in my case because I use a DSP for bass management with my LS50's
Windows 10 says this DAC is 32bit/384. No way, all I can get out of it is 192/32. That 32 bit thing is odd because I thought this was a 24 bit DAC. Perhaps it digests 32 bit data and ignores the least significant 8 bits. Even JRiver said it was sending 32 bits when set to automatic bit depth. Perhaps one of the technical wizards around here can shed some light on this behavior
The soft feet on the nice silver case keep the unit in place even when connected to a rather heavy RCA interconnect. It's late here, and tomorrow is likely to be another awful August day of heat and humidity. What should I listen to?