This is a brief review and measurements of the Weilang Volume Control and remote control input switcher. It also has a Bluetooth interface built-in. It is available on Aliexpress for under US $40. A member of our local audiophile society brought it to our meeting today for testing.
The case is budget category but still metal with built-in mains power supply:
Seems like a lot of companies brand this product. Here is a picture of its guts from the Aliexpress seller:
It is impossible to fathom how such a device can be built and sold for so little money.
There is a remote control which I did not see or play with.
The heart of the unit is the TI PGA2310 volume control IC. It has very good specs:
That is SINAD of 107 dB. Let's see if it gets there.
Audio Measurements
I tested the unit with 2 volt at max volume:
Sorry I did not reset the reference level in FFT to 0 dB.
At max volume there is actually 3 dB of amplification. The output is polluted by fair bit of mains and power supply noise. We also have a lot of harmonic distortion, degrading my Audio Precision APx555's loopback SINAD of 122 dB down to 89 dB. So clearly this box is not transparent and under-performs majority of the DACs we test here.
Reducing the volume to "97" gets us this:
Now we get unity gain (no amplification) but performance does not improve.
TI's measurements show that the best performance is at much higher output voltage (about 5 volt):
We are still far short of that graph though at 2 volt output.
Conclusions
While likely not an audible concern for most listeners, the performance of Weiliang Input switcher and volume control is not that great. It would degrade the performance of even our entry level DACs in most cases. The Passive Talema unit I tested recently has much better performance but costs more.
For secondary use the Weiliang should be fine.
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As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.
Please support reviews like this by donating using: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/
The case is budget category but still metal with built-in mains power supply:
Seems like a lot of companies brand this product. Here is a picture of its guts from the Aliexpress seller:
It is impossible to fathom how such a device can be built and sold for so little money.
There is a remote control which I did not see or play with.
The heart of the unit is the TI PGA2310 volume control IC. It has very good specs:
That is SINAD of 107 dB. Let's see if it gets there.
Audio Measurements
I tested the unit with 2 volt at max volume:
Sorry I did not reset the reference level in FFT to 0 dB.
At max volume there is actually 3 dB of amplification. The output is polluted by fair bit of mains and power supply noise. We also have a lot of harmonic distortion, degrading my Audio Precision APx555's loopback SINAD of 122 dB down to 89 dB. So clearly this box is not transparent and under-performs majority of the DACs we test here.
Reducing the volume to "97" gets us this:
Now we get unity gain (no amplification) but performance does not improve.
TI's measurements show that the best performance is at much higher output voltage (about 5 volt):
We are still far short of that graph though at 2 volt output.
Conclusions
While likely not an audible concern for most listeners, the performance of Weiliang Input switcher and volume control is not that great. It would degrade the performance of even our entry level DACs in most cases. The Passive Talema unit I tested recently has much better performance but costs more.
For secondary use the Weiliang should be fine.
-------
As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.
Please support reviews like this by donating using: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/