Hope the B200 Amp is coming in soon!~ Im really hoping that Topping speaker amps last longer than they used to though. Their performance is great but they've always had reliability & QC issues. They're performing even better than Purifi amps, would be great to see these used in home theater w. like multiple in a single chassis running off a single large PSU.
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Topping B100 Amplifier Review
- Thread starter amirm
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Roland68
Major Contributor
I would be interested to know what you find so bad about an external power supply, or what bad experience you have had with it.
In reality, these devices with external power supplies are expanding the market a lot. Firstly, because of the smaller devices, which makes them particularly attractive for desktops and small living spaces, and secondly because of the cheaper price. This also often makes them more acceptable to your partner.
A big advantage of external power supplies is clearly the lack of emissions from the power supply in the audio device. To achieve this in a housing, both a certain size and a more complex construction are necessary.
In addition to the costs listed, there are also handling and shipping costs, which are now painfully high and are mainly caused by the actual volume of the packaging.
REK2575
Active Member
What you call innovation, others may call flooding the market with cheap, disposable products that only very marginally improve on the previous iterations.
Check out the Audio Electronics Review Index and you will find 53 Topping products -- 53! -- reviewed by ASR: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?pages/Reviews/
There are 12 Yamaha product reviews in the same span of time.
Sokel
Master Contributor
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If someone is about the end result never looks at the individuals but the sum.
Ok,80 nice Watt if you use 4 Ohm speakers,50 W with 8 Ohm (I'm oversimplifying but is an example)
Now do some minimal room correction manually or with Dirac,etc.
And say eat 3dB because of it (ok,I know is low but is an example) .
Now subtract distance,CF,speaker sensitivity,etc
All that before even play any music.
You end up where?That's the available power.
Enough?Depends on the use case.
Ok,80 nice Watt if you use 4 Ohm speakers,50 W with 8 Ohm (I'm oversimplifying but is an example)
Now do some minimal room correction manually or with Dirac,etc.
And say eat 3dB because of it (ok,I know is low but is an example) .
Now subtract distance,CF,speaker sensitivity,etc
All that before even play any music.
You end up where?That's the available power.
Enough?Depends on the use case.
It has been out for a while.
Bleib
Major Contributor
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Obviously he means the review ..
Exactly. It will be fine for many people, and for many people it will not.
I have two LA90D amplifiers, which put out a little less power per channel (70W @ 4 ohms). They power my midranges and tweeters, and play plenty loud for me, even with room correction and equalization. My listening position is a little over 3m from the speakers.
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From a functional point, they are fine.
At my home, my wife covered the 220 line to the indoor SPILT style AC unit with a fake IVY vine. So, other than that they are superbly ugly and don't fit with any decor, get in the way when moving things around, are severe trip hazards unless you can manage to get them out of the way (and hide them) and about a thousand other reasons.
A wall wart would be better, at least its out of the way & something can be put in front of it.
Why would I have a small living space? The 1100 square foot place I am in now is half the size of what I am used to (for my wife & myself).
And I lived on a ship for 17 years full time (40 hours a week plus on board when not working, although I had weekends off) & if the ship were in Port, I left for the weekend & never came back to it unless the weekend was over or the ship was leaving.
It wasn't worth it to leave it during the week.
So I am basically done with small, cramped, quarters and am not going to clutter the space I do have with hazardous (like trip hazard) ugliness.
you mean basicaly every company before topping?
REK2575
Active Member
I do not mean that.
I'm not sure about that. Read his next post immediately below the one I quoted.
Agreed. Buying an amp with 0 dB gain was not remotely possible 10+ years ago, even 5.
(I still voted great.)
Listening distance is four meters? I thought we were discussing desktop systems.
totti1965
Senior Member
@amirm: are these two red lines channel imbalance or two different gain settings?This is a review and detailed measurements of the Topping B100 "monoblock" amplifier. It was sent to me by the company and costs US $299.
View attachment 392530
I was surprised by the desktop/low profile of the amplifier. I expected something a lot taller/chunkier especially since this is a class B amplifier and not class D. Power supply is of course external:
View attachment 392531
Nice to see balanced input, three gain settings and trigger input.
The front panel power button is touch sensitive. You have to learn to just touch and remove your finger for it to power on. When it goes into protection, you have to hold it until error codes disappear and then touch again for powering up.
A wish for a follow up version is a series of tall color LED bars going from left to right for visual enjoyment. Kind of like this:
If you are not familiar with my power amplifier audio measurements, please watch this tutorial:
Topping B100 Amplifier Measurements
Let's start with balanced input at low gain:
View attachment 392532
Distortion is vanishingly low at -141 dB. Power supply spikes are taller than it actually. So we are left with noise which is limited by the analyzer. Still, the B100 manages to grab the top spot in our rankings:
View attachment 392538
I know, there is no gain there so let's go up to medium gain:
View attachment 392539
Performance is essentially the same as we again, limited by analyzer inherent noise. This requires a bit higher than 4.5 volt to reach max power. So let's test high gain:
View attachment 392540
Now we see a bit more noise limiting SINAD. But even then, we are better than threshold of hearing.
I hope you are using this amplifier with balanced connection but in case you are not, here are the measurements using RCA at medium and high gains (latter needs less than 1 volt for full power):
View attachment 392541
Edit: this should say high gain, not low:
View attachment 392542
Check out this stunning performance in noise department at 5 watts and max power:
View attachment 392543
View attachment 392544
From here on I will stay with medium gain using XLR balanced input.
View attachment 392545
We can tell from above graph that there is no increase in distortion at higher frequencies. As a result, our 19+20 kHz result remains excellent as well:
View attachment 392546
Not being a class D amplifier, there is no concern regarding load dependency (an issue with some class D amps):
View attachment 392547
The protection circuit is aggressive with 4 ohm load, not allowing the amplifier to go into clipping:
View attachment 392548
This means that if you hear any distortion, it is somewhere else and not in the power amplifier. I tried to measure power at 1% THD but the protection circuit would not allow it. THD would remain incredibly low and then shut down if I increased input voltage. So 86 watts is what you get for max and peak power. Company spec is 83 watts which is an honest assessment. They do spec 100 watts at < 1% THD which I probably could achieve if I tried harder.
Let's not how the B100 blows the competition out of water with respect to noise level. It was so low that I had to move the graph up to see its results above! The analyzer noise actually takes over around 30 watts as it changes its gain to accommodate higher voltage (the step up).
8 Ohm measurement does allow clipping due to lower currents required:
View attachment 392549
Once again we see the massive gap in noise and distortion vs our reference blue line. We are talking 25 dB!
Even more amazing is the fact that B100 maintains its superlative performance at all frequencies, down to 20 Hz!
View attachment 392552
Amplifier is ready on power up although I did overserve a tiny improvement after a few minutes:
View attachment 392550
The amplifier only got modestly warm after the power testing:
View attachment 392551
P.S. I don't have PowerCube measurements for you due to aforementioned aggressive protection circuit, not allowing me to measure peak power.
Edit: forgot the power on/off noise:
View attachment 392594
Conclusions
Topping is clearly its own competition, constantly pushing the envelop in noise and distortion. Even when you get used to them delivering on these fronts, they come up with this amplifier where test after test shows excellence in engineering and utmost dedication to highest levels of fidelity. All of this comes in a compact enclosure with a reasonable cost. I have no choice but to bow to their mission and abilities.
It is my absolute pleasure to recommend the Topping B100 monolock amplifier.
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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/
If the last, what gain?
Can you tell the reason for using a power amp without any gain?
Am I right to assume that it is the same as connecting the 2 V or 4 V device or the preamp directly to the (Horn-) speaker?
Thank you for enlighten me!
thorsten
Roland68
Major Contributor
The last point applies to the amplifier market of the last 30-35 years.
Not much has changed.
If the NAD 2200 and the matching preamp weren't so big, I wouldn't have a Topping PA5 on my desk.
In reality, there are 11 Yamaha amplifier tests compared to 8 Topping amplifier tests, which completely negates your sensationalist claim.
The reason there aren't more Yamaha amplifier tests is the high shipping costs, especially from other countries and continents.
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That’s what I meant by “creative.” And I’ve seen some weirder stuff in components made by the big companies. Circuit boards placed on the tops of heat sinks, USB and HDMI ports in the interior of the machine connected with consumer USB and HDMI cables, etc.
If you want to see a really weird layout, look up the Sony HAP-Z1ES.
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