This is a review and detailed measurements of the AIYIMA A80 stereo amplifier and DAC. It was sent to me by the company and costs US $199.
As you can see, the A80 sports a nice sized graphical display showing one of the prettiest "VU" meters I have seen. It works well too by auto-ranging depending on how loud you play! I was pleasantly surprised to see a proper DAC integrated in it in the form of ESS ESS9038Q2M. You can see its feature set exposed in the back:
We have the usual DAC connections such as USB-0C, Toslink and Coax.
I am always pleased to see balanced inputs and we have that in the form of TRS. You can get simple adapter or cables from this to XLR.
Power supply as usual for this class is external. I tested with the 48 volt/5 amp GaN unit as supplied by the company.
We even have trigger input although with the included DAC, you won't need it.
Speaker terminals are just large enough to let me use my oversized locking banana plugs.
A remote is provided which is very nice.
Company has really nailed the functionality here. Let's see if it has good performance to go with it.
If you are not familiar with amplifier measurements, please watch my tutorial on it:
[And subscribe to the channel
]
AIYIMA A80 Stereo Amplifier Measurements
Let's start with analog input using balanced and see how it does at 5 watts:
This is excellent performance with distortion products below -100 dB. It is the general noise level that keeps SINAD below that. SINAD of nearly 90 dB places the A80 well above average for all amplifiers tested to date:
Digital USB input shows that the amp is the limiting factor with the DAC providing transparency:
There is a tiny bit of rise in noise floor in low frequencies but otherwise, we have the same performance.
RCA input costs some penalty especially in channel 1:
I like to see 16 bits of dynamic range and we come short a bit, literally:
At max power though, this improves beyond what most people need:
Amplifier sports PFFB design which should largely do away with load dependency but some remains:
If the ringing was not there at 4 ohm, perhaps the 8 ohm rise would be more negligible.
Crosstalk is surprisingly good:
Both multitone and 19+20 kHz intermodulation distortion tests show the typical natural rise of distortion with frequency:
There is healthy amount of power here:
For apples vs apples power measurements, I test at 1% THD but the A80 would shutdown before reaching that level of distortion (atypical of TPA designs). So I opted for 0.4%:
My 40 Hz low frequency power rating likewise required messing with the THD percentage:
So a bit of loss there.
I had to reduce the percentage even lower to get a power sweep from 20 to 20 kHz:
This demonstrates the difficulty of a priori deciding to measure power at 1% THD. This amplifier would have produced zero power with that rating!
I forgot to run the power vs frequency sweeps. Will see if I can run them later and add to the review.
The aggressive protection circuit would have made it a pain to run the reactive load tests so I didn't.
There is a mild power on pop:
The amp was stable on power up, requiring no warm up:
Post running the FTC stress test, I took an infrared image of the case which had warmed up fair bit:
Distribution of heat is very good.
Conclusions
Usually, any digital input in this class of amplifier is a "checklist item." In the A80, we have a serious DAC that provides a transparent path to the amplifier. The design is excellent given the wide high res display which can show levels, spectrum, etc. Company has clearly been listening to our feedback. Performance overall ranks from very good to excellent for the class. The only miss is less than perfect frequency response. For those of us older, we can't hear that high up anyway but for others, the response with a simple resistive load should be flatter.
I am going to recommend the AIYIMA A80. I believe it is going on sale next week.
------------
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/
As you can see, the A80 sports a nice sized graphical display showing one of the prettiest "VU" meters I have seen. It works well too by auto-ranging depending on how loud you play! I was pleasantly surprised to see a proper DAC integrated in it in the form of ESS ESS9038Q2M. You can see its feature set exposed in the back:
We have the usual DAC connections such as USB-0C, Toslink and Coax.
I am always pleased to see balanced inputs and we have that in the form of TRS. You can get simple adapter or cables from this to XLR.
Power supply as usual for this class is external. I tested with the 48 volt/5 amp GaN unit as supplied by the company.
We even have trigger input although with the included DAC, you won't need it.
Speaker terminals are just large enough to let me use my oversized locking banana plugs.
A remote is provided which is very nice.
Company has really nailed the functionality here. Let's see if it has good performance to go with it.
If you are not familiar with amplifier measurements, please watch my tutorial on it:
[And subscribe to the channel
]AIYIMA A80 Stereo Amplifier Measurements
Let's start with analog input using balanced and see how it does at 5 watts:
This is excellent performance with distortion products below -100 dB. It is the general noise level that keeps SINAD below that. SINAD of nearly 90 dB places the A80 well above average for all amplifiers tested to date:
Digital USB input shows that the amp is the limiting factor with the DAC providing transparency:
There is a tiny bit of rise in noise floor in low frequencies but otherwise, we have the same performance.
RCA input costs some penalty especially in channel 1:
I like to see 16 bits of dynamic range and we come short a bit, literally:
At max power though, this improves beyond what most people need:
Amplifier sports PFFB design which should largely do away with load dependency but some remains:
If the ringing was not there at 4 ohm, perhaps the 8 ohm rise would be more negligible.
Crosstalk is surprisingly good:
Both multitone and 19+20 kHz intermodulation distortion tests show the typical natural rise of distortion with frequency:
There is healthy amount of power here:
For apples vs apples power measurements, I test at 1% THD but the A80 would shutdown before reaching that level of distortion (atypical of TPA designs). So I opted for 0.4%:
My 40 Hz low frequency power rating likewise required messing with the THD percentage:
So a bit of loss there.
I had to reduce the percentage even lower to get a power sweep from 20 to 20 kHz:
This demonstrates the difficulty of a priori deciding to measure power at 1% THD. This amplifier would have produced zero power with that rating!
I forgot to run the power vs frequency sweeps. Will see if I can run them later and add to the review.
The aggressive protection circuit would have made it a pain to run the reactive load tests so I didn't.
There is a mild power on pop:
The amp was stable on power up, requiring no warm up:
Post running the FTC stress test, I took an infrared image of the case which had warmed up fair bit:
Distribution of heat is very good.
Conclusions
Usually, any digital input in this class of amplifier is a "checklist item." In the A80, we have a serious DAC that provides a transparent path to the amplifier. The design is excellent given the wide high res display which can show levels, spectrum, etc. Company has clearly been listening to our feedback. Performance overall ranks from very good to excellent for the class. The only miss is less than perfect frequency response. For those of us older, we can't hear that high up anyway but for others, the response with a simple resistive load should be flatter.
I am going to recommend the AIYIMA A80. I believe it is going on sale next week.
------------
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/
