This is a review and detailed measurements of the "upgraded" TPA3221 chip based AIYIMA A05 integrated amplifier. It is on kind loan from a member and costs US $80 from Amazon including Prime shipping.
For a budget amplifier, the controls feel nice:
As you see, tone controls are provided. Alas, there is no detent or switch for flat response. If you center them, you actually get too much bass. I had to adjust them using iterative measurements to settings you see in the picture above for flat response (see measurements later in this review).
A giant external power supply providing 32 volts is included which dwarfs the size of the unit itself:
I dislike these little speaker terminals but they are very common in this price class. They are too close to each other to connect beefy locking banana connectors I use for testing.
Bluetooth is provided which I did not test.
In use, the unit never even got warm so efficiency must be quite high. Or else, the heat is not transmitted to the case.
AIYIMA A05 Measurements
Here is our usual dashboard:
SINAD is dominated by distortion and ranks below average of all the amplifiers tested to date:
Still, for this price and category, I think this is pretty good.
Signal to noise ratio becomes good at full power:
Crosstalk is decent as well:
Here is our frequency response with my adjustments of the tone control:
As you see we get a typical peaking of the response when I change impedance to 8 ohm. This is due to the filter in the class D amplifier interacting with the load. Fortunately you have tone controls here so you can compensate for it.
Multitone shows best performance in mid frequencies which is a good thing compared to the alternative:
Let's see how much power the A05 can produce into 4 ohm load:
This is much more than I expected. We get decent amount of power even with 8 ohm:
Above is with 1 kHz. Let's see how it does when we vary that:
Not pretty at either high frequencies or very low. As noted, mid frequencies do well which is good as that is where we are most sensitive.
Conclusions
Getting decent amount of power and low distortion and noise is hard in ultra low price category but the AIYIMA A05 gets there. So I decided to grade it on a curve and give it my recommendation.
------------
As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.
Any donations are much appreciated using: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/
For a budget amplifier, the controls feel nice:
As you see, tone controls are provided. Alas, there is no detent or switch for flat response. If you center them, you actually get too much bass. I had to adjust them using iterative measurements to settings you see in the picture above for flat response (see measurements later in this review).
A giant external power supply providing 32 volts is included which dwarfs the size of the unit itself:
I dislike these little speaker terminals but they are very common in this price class. They are too close to each other to connect beefy locking banana connectors I use for testing.
Bluetooth is provided which I did not test.
In use, the unit never even got warm so efficiency must be quite high. Or else, the heat is not transmitted to the case.
AIYIMA A05 Measurements
Here is our usual dashboard:
SINAD is dominated by distortion and ranks below average of all the amplifiers tested to date:
Still, for this price and category, I think this is pretty good.
Signal to noise ratio becomes good at full power:
Crosstalk is decent as well:
Here is our frequency response with my adjustments of the tone control:
As you see we get a typical peaking of the response when I change impedance to 8 ohm. This is due to the filter in the class D amplifier interacting with the load. Fortunately you have tone controls here so you can compensate for it.
Multitone shows best performance in mid frequencies which is a good thing compared to the alternative:
Let's see how much power the A05 can produce into 4 ohm load:
This is much more than I expected. We get decent amount of power even with 8 ohm:
Above is with 1 kHz. Let's see how it does when we vary that:
Not pretty at either high frequencies or very low. As noted, mid frequencies do well which is good as that is where we are most sensitive.
Conclusions
Getting decent amount of power and low distortion and noise is hard in ultra low price category but the AIYIMA A05 gets there. So I decided to grade it on a curve and give it my recommendation.
------------
As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.
Any donations are much appreciated using: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/
