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Review and Measurements of xDuoo TA-10 Tube DAC & HP Amp

sychan

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Based on testing I have done in the past, I am quite dubious that there is much measureable distortion difference between them. But sure, if someone wants to send them, I can test.
@amirm Do you still have this headphone amp? I succumbed to curiousity and picked up a used TA-01 and did some tube rolling with some 12au7 and variants. One of the tubes I tested, an old RCA 5963, sounded really, really transparent, seemingly tubeless. Another, an old Westinghouse 12au7 was "so tubey it was almost tubby". I'd be curious to see how these 2 extremes on the tube spectrum test objectively and would be happy to send them to you.
 
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amirm

amirm

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Yes, I still have it. Thanks for the offer. My workload is crazy right now. So let's touch base in a few weeks to see if I can schedule them in.
 

Guddu

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I am wondering what happens when Digital or AUX/RCA is input and line out is used?
Example:
USB in -> DAC used -> RCA Line out >>>> Is preamp not in action? No volume control and no involvement of tube?
AUX/RCA in -> input switch selects the input -> RCA Line out >>>> Is preamp not in action? No volume control and no involvement of tube?

Line out here isn't pre-out?
 

MacCali

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This is a review and detailed measurements of the xDuoo TA-10 DAC and Tube headphone amplifier plus pre-amplifier. It was kindly sent to me by the online store, Xtenik Audio. The TA-10 costs US $290.

I must confess, my impression of xDuoo is one of ultimate budget products, with looks and performance to go with that. So I was hesitant to accept this review when Steven from Xtenik Audio reached out to me. I warned him that I would write the review as I see it, bad or good. To my pleasant surprise, he was perfectly OK with that. So here we go.

Everything I thought about xDuoo as a brand went out the window when I pulled the unit out of the box and noticed its attractive and high build quality:


The rotary control feels nice and very responsive. The gold accent on the 1/4 inch headphone jack adds some interest to the black face. The XLR output is for convenient, not for "balanced" output as testing will show later. There is a balanced version of this unit with two tubes to provide differential output.

The paint feels slippery in a nice way.

There is quite a bit of heft to the unit, again giving a feel of quality.

The back panel shows a wealth of functionality not obvious at first:
In addition to the standard USB input, there are two analog inputs. This is music to my ear as I have an analog source (Reel to Reel) and I am so annoyed to have use a pre-amp because the DAC doesn't have such an input. If you have a turntable, you can integrate it easily just as well. Or a portable music player.

The volume control is implemented using a TI chip so it is able to control the output of the pre-amp in addition to the DAC. You will get perfect channel balance in this regard but likely at the expense of some noise than if it was implemented in the DAC (and hence not working with analog input).

There is S/PDIF output allowing the TA-10 to act as a USB to S/PDIF bridge as well.

Yeh, there is that tube. Does it destroy the performance of the nice looking unit like this? Let's find out.

DAC Audio Measurements
Given the line outs, I started my testing just measuring the DAC portion independent of the headphone amplifier:

View attachment 31555

Wow, what do we have here? Surely this can't be going through the tube with its excellent THD+N and hence SINAD (signal over noise and distortion). The TA-10 easily lands in the second tier of all DACs tested, credit going to the good implementation of AKM AK4490 DAC chip:
View attachment 31556

Output level is a bit low though at 1.7 volts. Which they had juiced this up a bit more to meet our nominal requirement of 2 volts.

Orderly measurements follow in other tests such as frequency response:

View attachment 31558

And jitter:
View attachment 31559

Surely they screwed up linearity:

View attachment 31560

Nope. That too is excellent.

How about intermodulation distortion versus level?
View attachment 31561

Performance parallels the excellent Topping DX3 Pro but with some penalty in noise department (and a bit on distortion). As I predicted, the TI volume control is adding its own (small) layer of distortion and noise. But hey, this is still very nice performance as most DACs struggle to match or beat the DX3 Pro.

So clearly the tube is out of the loop on DAC output. Let's all cheer at once! :)

Headphone Audio Measurements
Let's start with measuring power versus distortion and noise using 300 ohm load:
View attachment 31563

Ouch! The tube does a number here creating the typical rise of distortion at less than 1 milliwatts of output. That is heavily offset though by tons of output power, producing nearly 1/3 of watt.

Going down to 50 ohm and measuring both connectors we see identical performance there:

View attachment 31564

Most if not all the tube headphone amps I have measured fall apart with low impedance loads. They have high voltage output so do well with high impedance loads. But have little current and hence do poorly when the load impedance goes down. Not the case with TA-10. It motors on producing whopping 1.5 watts of power here!

Stepping down even more current hungry load of 33 ohm we get:
View attachment 31566

Now we are peaking over 2 watts of power! Nice. But yes, distortion is through the roof compared to solid state designs.

Frequency response remains ruler flat:
View attachment 31567

Channel imbalance is non-existent due to use of digitally controlled analog IC volume control as mentioned in the review:

View attachment 31569

While you can get this type of performance in DACs with volume control, you have very few options to do the same for analog inputs that TA-10 has.

Output impedance is decent:
View attachment 32294

Note: original review had this measurement incorrectly as 47 ohm.

Headphone Listening Tests
I happen to have my son over again with his undisturbed high frequency response that I lost years back. We matched levels with a Topping DX3 Pro as best as we could using ear (electronic matching is not very effective due to high output impedance of TA-10). Using HD-650 headphones, my son could not tell the difference. I thought I heard some subtle changes but really, nothing that I can swear to be able to tell consistently. And certainly not if I listened to TA-10 by itself.

Just listening with the HD-650, the TA-10 had thundering amount of power, detail and fidelity, belying its poor measured performance. Power erases many sins here.

Switching to Hifiman HE-400i allowed me to hear some subtle differences. What there is though, is hard to describe as it was highly content dependent. I thought sometimes I heard slightly brighter but more detailed sound out of DX3 Pro as compared to TA-10. But really, the difference if there, is small. My son could not hear any difference.

We then tried the AKG N700 in passive mode. It too sounded too close to tell the two units apart.

Note that highly precise volume matching was needed to arrive at these outcomes. Just half or full dB of level differential titled the balance easily in favor of one or the other.

As with all of my previous testing, there is no tube magic here, no widening of sound stage, "warm glow" or other nonsense. What you hear is what is in your music if you test in controlled manner.

Conclusions
They say don't judge a book by its cover and I sure was guilty of that going into this review. The xDuoo TA-10 is competently designed and engineered both from mechanical and electronics point of view. The DAC implementation is quite excellent and feature set unique and highly desirable.

The tube section does add copious amount of distortion. Alas, listening tests showed them to be highly masked by the content. What is not masked is very high power output stage enabling the TA-10 to drive headphones to distortions of their own, well before its own sets in. You get full flexibility to use wide range of headphones and still get to ear bleeding levels. Sure, there will be some change its frequency response. Hopefully that will tilt in favor of your preference, not the other way around.

If you ever get tired of the tube headphone out, you can use its line out to drive different amps due to its excellent DAC implementation.

If you are itching to have a tube headphone amplifier with least amount of compromises elsewhere, I am happy to recommend the xDuoo TA-10. Someone really knew what they were doing when designing this unit. Lesson to other companies that use the excuse of a tube and destroy the performance of the product in every other way.

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As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.

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Will we be seeing the TA-10R soon? Wonder what that can provide
 

iucoen

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There's a new 10R that just came out. I'm really tempted to try this out. Fully featured dac/tube amp with lots of connectivity.

https://apos.audio/products/xduoo-ta-10r-tube-dac-amp

I just got the TA-10R. There is audible background hiss/hum like tape noise. At first the noise was mosly coming from the right channel, and I noticed channel imbalance as well, with the left channel noticeably louder. I tried to reseat the tube and now the channels are balanced, but so is the noise...

Is the noise level something I should expect? My headphones are the Sundara. The noise level is constant regardless of volume setting. Is this something I can fix with changing tubes?
 

elsifend

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I just got the TA-10R. There is audible background hiss/hum like tape noise. At first the noise was mosly coming from the right channel, and I noticed channel imbalance as well, with the left channel noticeably louder. I tried to reseat the tube and now the channels are balanced, but so is the noise...

Is the noise level something I should expect? My headphones are the Sundara. The noise level is constant regardless of volume setting. Is this something I can fix with changing tubes?

Do you have a wifi router close to the amp? It could be wifi interference. I also had very audible background noise with my TA-10R. I tried various methods (changing tubes, using different headphones, adding an UPS, etc) to fix it, but to no avail. Finally I was able to get rid of the noise by moving my router away from the amp.
 

iucoen

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Do you have a wifi router close to the amp? It could be wifi interference. I also had very audible background noise with my TA-10R. I tried various methods (changing tubes, using different headphones, adding an UPS, etc) to fix it, but to no avail. Finally I was able to get rid of the noise by moving my router away from the amp.
I changed to JJ ECC802s tube and the noise is gone.
 

vlad335

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Just received the upgraded TA-10R and it sounds really good using the built in DAC and the balanced output into my Hifiman HE-560 V4. Better headphone experience than my RME ADI-2 IMO.

Ordered a NOS tube and waiting for it to arrive.

Would love to send this to Amir but don't want to go without it right now. Maybe later.
 
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MacCali

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Just received the upgraded TA-10R and it sounds really good using the built in DAC and the balanced output into my Hifiman HE-560 V4. Better headphone experience than my RME ADI-2 IMO.

Ordered a NOS tube and waiting for it to arrive.

Would love to send this to Amir but don't want to go without it right now. Maybe later.
I have had an equal experience, I got a meridian prime which is over 1500 dac/amp, the JNOG, and neo iDSD. It sounds very close to the JNOG which was my go to and has the same dac chip, however I am guessing the tube not sure if it’s a buffer or gain stage on this unit. Not that knowledgeable.

It’s the only unit I’m using now because it sounds so good, I burned the tube in and it hasn’t changed but I am waiting to tube roll. Will probably be way better.

So many people talk smack about Chinese products, this unit murders the Schitt entry level tube units. All of which I’ve heard and honestly sound no different than the regular amps. Just soundstage changes on Schitt.

Plus, this unit vs the regular 10 doesn’t get burning hot as pointed out in many reviews which should increase the longevity of the unit.

I am highly impressed, but I will say that for some reason when outputting from the unit I am not getting the same performance on sound. Not sure if anything is going on in output where the whole signal isn’t coming out. It sounds equal to JNOG on output.

Not implying the sound is bad, but it’s not the same as XLR or SE out
 

vlad335

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MacCali

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It's not? APOS says it is.

https://apos.audio/products/xduoo-ta-10r-tube-dac-amp#:~:text=xDuoo released the TA-10 (this model’s predecessor) in,by other DAC/Amps before it even hit shelves.

so, using the built in DAC there is no difference between the 1/4" output and the 4 pin XLR? Interesting.

Honestly asking. Did I waste money buying a 4 pin XLR for my Hifiman to use with amp?
Yea that’s a typo, the original review I watched mentioned that it says balanced but is not. It isn’t but I still use XLR out.

I think they just made it look like that or made it for convenience of just having two hp outputs.

Really wish the output was producing the same sound for speakers. Since it sounds really nice but the difference between it and my JNOG isn’t really noticeable and was easy to A-B on my integrated. There is slight change but not like headphones using these two dacs. Also when headphones aren’t connected the unit does get really hot if you use it as a pre. I guess the internal power isn’t being used by headphones therefore it’s just turning into heat.
 

JoostE

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Very interested in this unit. Wasn't convinced of tubes at all at first but listening to some it surely made the music more enjoyable for me.

Some badly mastered songs were far less obstructive or in your face. Since I like to listen to badly recorded dance / pop music from time to time, a tube could be a great addition to my setup.

Is this in line with what this unit is doing for you? Any chance we can get a measurement @amirm ? Would be awesome if this is an even better DAC implementation of the first version.
 

MacCali

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Very interested in this unit. Wasn't convinced of tubes at all at first but listening to some it surely made the music more enjoyable for me.

Some badly mastered songs were far less obstructive or in your face. Since I like to listen to badly recorded dance / pop music from time to time, a tube could be a great addition to my setup.

Is this in line with what this unit is doing for you? Any chance we can get a measurement @amirm ? Would be awesome if this is an even better DAC implementation of the first version.
Are you asking for the TA-10R? I doubt it will happen anytime soon.

I would have to assume the way all these Chinese companies work is that the product is better. I’ve never owned the TA-10, but I’m using the 10R right now as we speak.

I own 4 dacs as of now, ifi Neo iDSD, Gishelli JNOG, a pro-ject ESS dac, don’t have it in front of me right now but it’s the S2 line.

It to me is by far the best unit for pure musical enjoyment. Now the JNOG has the same chip, I would say it’s either more detailed or transparent, which would identify poorly recorded songs. So I am guessing along the line that it’s something you would be looking for.

I wish I could provide more details, but I’m not quite yet a full fledged audio wiz to break it down.

I will say though using the unit itself the bass has increased, not sure if that’s strictly sufficient power being supplied. Nor has it changed the frequency response of my headphones, it’s not bloated, it’s actually made me realize the potential my headphones had and they are not hard to drive. I’ve used it with 280mw and it sounds loud enough at 1 o’clock with that much power.

Like I said I wish I could explain in understandable detail but I do enjoy it very much. I was told by many not to buy Chinese and I only tried it cause I’ve never had a tube amp, even though this is a hybrid I was just trying to see what it is all about.

My only other comparison is with the budget Schitt unit and to be honest I can hardly tell the difference between that Schitt tube and any other budget Schitt amp. The tube “flavor” as some call it is non-existent.

I would suggest purchasing this ASAP as the AKM chip in this unit has already halted production and supplies maybe limited. As you may be aware the factory had a fire.

Second, I don’t know based on this if it will come back but drop had it 70 dollars off the first time it was for sale and I got 10 dollars off just for signing up for an account even though I already had one. So I got 80 dollars off msrp and therefore I said why not. If money is a factor for you or any of us that has already dished out so much on our systems
 
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