Topping B100 Amplifier Review

[totti1965]

I put my Christmas gift, The Topping B100 Monos yesterday into my HiFi chain.

It was subjective an overwhelming experience for me.

Here is a little bit of the subjective Bla Bla Bla, which I wrote to my friends Peter, Gregor and Helge, with whom I do some listening sessions from time to time:

„Now I have humbly read all about Bob Dylan from your Rolling Stones 2012 article https://www.rollingstone.de/bob-dylan-abschied-von-gestern-das-vollstaendige-interview-355303/ (many, many, many thanks!) and find everything comparatively unimportant, which I was lucky enough to experience tonight. After all, it was supposed to be all about music - and why shouldn't it be allowed to come from a transistor radio?

Nevertheless:
My XLR cables arrived yesterday. Today at 10 p.m. I was finally able to put the Topping B100 power amplifiers into operation. Funnily enough, they were connected via RCA cables...... The B100 mono blocks operate in Class B and have the world's best measured values for noise, harmonic distortion and also for the important intermodulation distortion (which simulates complex music signals).

The sound:

Oh Wow! Oh Wow! Oh Wow!

It makes a difference if the distortion is 3,000 times lower than with your AMR 777s.

Blackness. Total blackness. Power! Fear! Shock! Everything deep, pure, clear! Frightening in the coarse dynamics that I flinched at the drums during KUMMER by Trio, although played minimally quieter than today at noon via the Fosi. I thought something had fallen over in the room. The blow came out of nowhere.
Then the “separation” between the instruments on the one hand and the “aura” around the instruments on the other. I would never have thought that Golden Brown by the Stranglers could sound so audiophile (and the drums so fucking REALISTIC).

As always with new stuff, Suzanne Vega was the first with TOMS DINNER on the SOLTITUDE STANDING
So pure, so unbelievably pure.

How could I have listened to the Sonos Play One for years?
How could I have only listened to the Fosi V3 amplifier for a year?

So this is what it sounds like when a power amplifier simply disappears and becomes invisible in the signal path.

So even non-audiophile records are actually that good (or at least that pornographically detailed)!

That's how beautifully the Timmermanns developed my WaveMon 182/22 speakers.

Ray Brown's double bass suddenly sings at the bottom: structure, melody, which before was just droning. And on the Oscar Petterson I even discovered a piano note floating in the eternal 96 kHz reverberation of the sides, which even escaped me with you!
Things fade out without the new sound having completely displaced the old one. The old quieter tone sounds even further without being masked away..... Isn't that what Hiraga said about good tubes?

Ella and Louis, also with 96 kHz -goil!!!

I think I would have missed out on all this if I had bought the Neumann speakers with their built-in primitive digital amplifiers limited to 24 kHz....

I'm afraid that next Black Friday Gregor and you will each be EUR 480,- poorer.....

There is no alternative to the B100, at least for speakers with more than 90 dB efficiency.“

 

[totti1965]

Without knowing the (protection) circuit/algorithm, adequate SOA protection will probably not be guaranteed.
With low speaker EPDR values, however, the load on the output transistors can exceed the permissible SOA limits even with moderate (real) average power. The amplifier may die before it even gets really warm.

My Pair of B100 is now just working for two days. Everything super fine so far. Speakers have 4 Ohms with a Minimum of 3.6 Ohms. But I am not a loud hearer.
I will tell you guys if Problems occure. I just hear Music with medium gain. Hope it will not be a new Topping PA 5 case. I will do a Poll.

 

[Julf]

Here is a little bit of the subjective Bla Bla Bla, which I wrote to my friends Peter, Gregor and Helge, with whom I do some listening sessions from time to time:

Tell me it was a parody of all the usual subjectivist voodoo...

 

[totti1965]

Tell me it was a parody of all the usual subjectivist voodoo...

Ha ha ha! Not at all! Invite me to a blind test!

 

[Julf]

Ha ha ha! Not at all! Invite me to a blind test!

Happy to, but it would have to be in Amsterdam.

It's just that your posting is something I am more used to seeing on the usual subjectivist faithful forums, not on a forum with "science" in the name.

 

[KSTR]

I'm pretty sure almost everybody will hear a difference between a lowly TPA3255-based amp (notably one without PFFB) and the B100, in a DBT.

 

[Deleted member 72219]

I'm pretty sure almost everybody will hear a difference between a lowly TPA3255-based amp (notably one without PFFB) and the B100, in a DBT.

Not a fair comparison by price.

What about A/B comparing a Hypex NC252MP-based or two NC250-based monoblocs against a pair of B100s?

-Ed

 

[pjug]

Happy to, but it would have to be in Amsterdam.

It's just that your posting is something I am more used to seeing on the usual subjectivist faithful forums, not on a forum with "science" in the name.

It makes it better if he won't admit to pulling our legs. Or maybe he found some really great mind altering stuff.

 

[KSTR]

Not a fair comparison by price.

Uh, I was just responding to the notion that @totti1965 heard a difference between these two specific amps.

 

[Deleted member 72219]

Uh, I was just responding to the notion that @totti1965 heard a difference between these two specific amps.

Fair.

 

[capslock]

I'm pretty sure almost everybody will hear a difference between a lowly TPA3255-based amp (notably one without PFFB) and the B100, in a DBT.

Well, there is user scope on old-fidelity-forum.de who has been maintaining for years that there is no way to distinguish a marginally competent amp from a good one. He's been challenging people to come for blind listening tests.

This is one of the more recent threads:

Verstärker Blindtest am 19. November

The old Universum is very marginally competent. The Burmester is signficantly better but still worse than the 3e or Topping amps with PFFB - actually, I am surprised at how bad it is considering the amout of thinking and hardware that went into it.

I read a couple of such threads a few years ago, have not followed recently, but AFIR, the result was always that people cannot tell the amps apart.

 

[Julf]

Well, there is user scope on old-fidelity-forum.de who has been maintaining for years that there is no way to distinguish a marginally competent amp from a good one. He's been challenging people to come for blind listening tests.

This is one of the more recent threads:

Verstärker Blindtest am 19. November

The old Universum is very marginally competent. The Burmester is signficantly better but still worse than the 3e or Topping amps with PFFB - actually, I am surprised at how bad it is considering the amout of thinking and hardware that went into it.

I read a couple of such threads a few years ago, have not followed recently, but AFIR, the result was always that people cannot tell the amps apart.

But as usual there was the predictable "but your loudspeakers were not good enough to show the differences in the amps" comments...

 

[Old_School_Brad]

But as usual there was the predictable "but your loudspeakers were not good enough to show the differences in the amps" comments...

It's such a classic. Where do you go frem there?

 

[capslock]

I read some more of that thread just now, and out of the three listeners, one could not discern, one got 7/10 the other 9/10. The trick in this case was that the Universum had a low damping factor of 30 and a somewhat insufficient lower corner frequency, so bass parts were what gave it away.

The Canton tower speakers were probably less than ideal to reveal distortion, as are many big name speakers. If you have a speaker that distorts in the midrange to the tune of 0.5 - 1% at 90 dB/1 m, you maybe have 80 dB at the listener position. It will be nearly impossible to detect even - 70 dB amplifier distortion swamped by -30 db loudspeaker distortion unless the amp produces substantial higher order distortion.

It would be great to use something like KEF R Meta as a test loudspeaker due to its relatively low distortion.

 

[Julf]

I read some more of that thread just now, and out of the three listeners, one could not discern, one got 7/10 the other 9/10. The trick in this case was that the Universum had a low damping factor of 30 and a somewhat insufficient lower corner frequency, so bass parts were what gave it away.

Right, the Universum was almost a pathological case.

The Canton tower speakers were probably less than ideal to reveal distortion, as are many big name speakers. If you have a speaker that distorts in the midrange to the tune of 0.5 - 1% at 90 dB/1 m, you maybe have 80 dB at the listener position. It will be nearly impossible to detect even - 70 dB amplifier distortion swamped by -30 db loudspeaker distortion unless the amp produces substantial higher order distortion.

I don't think you can find any speaker that wouldn't have at least an order of magnitude more distortion than non-pathological amplifiers.

 

[totti1965]

Happy to, but it would have to be in Amsterdam.

It's just that your posting is something I am more used to seeing on the usual subjectivist faithful forums, not on a forum with "science" in the name.

Yes, there is a thread here in the forum in which someone asked the members 10 or 15 questions to find out, if someone is a subjectivist or an objectivist.

My Test results have shown, that I am 90% Objectivist. But there are these damned 10% in me…..

Perhaps it was just he lack of PFFB in my Fosi V3 (Stereo) which results in a significantly more realistic frequency response of the B100 Monos which made the largest differences….

Normally I highly admire the sentence, spoken out by @amirm in one of his YouTube videos, in which he stated, that the slogan „I just only trust my own ears / what sounds better in my ears IS better“ is just nonsens: you can’t even trust your own ears. The exact same file, one day before an other file, one day after an other file played, can sound totally different. So don’t trust anybody, even don’t trust yourself!!!

 

[capslock]

Right, the Universum was almost a pathological case.

I don't think you can find any speaker that wouldn't have at least an order of magnitude more distortion than non-pathological amplifiers.

We can at least try to find a speaker that does not add too much nonlinear distortion at least in the all-critical midrange. Apart from KEF, some of the higher end B&W come to mind and diy approaches with Bliesma and Purifi.

Current drive would also help, but then you'd needto modify the amplifier you want to test...

I don't think there will ever be a chance to discern amplifier harmonic distortion unless it is high order, but I would not be surprised if some IMD was audible. That, by the way, is another argument for active analog or digital XOs.

 

[Jukka]

I noticed in the Topping shop (https://shenzhenaudio.com/products/...5d8r89rrFmVoY_16pgkENLterw29LG4FPSLqmMV0pY6yE), there is a comment that says:

At power levels higher than 5W @ 4 ohms, its safety protection will gently shut down the amplifier if the input signal contains higher level tones for more than a fraction of a second. For this reason I cannot give it 5 stars, because it is not a universal amplifier, and you have to check if it would be adequate with regard to the impedance and sensitivity of the connected speaker and the listening level.

Is this a common defect?

Amir tested power output of many frequencies, but those are single tones. How about max power with white/pink nose?

 

[KSTR]

Well, there is user scope on old-fidelity-forum.de who has been maintaining for years that there is no way to distinguish a marginally competent amp from a good one. He's been challenging people to come for blind listening tests.

That's not how proper high-sensivity blind tests are made. The moment it starts to develop into a challenge these tests tend to fail, notably in a sort of public setting and with fast A/B switching. Under such conditions the sensitivity is greatly reduced (unless after years of training, maybe), to the point that people may not even detect whether a track is now played in mono, or played inverted polarity, simple but very strong changes which normally are readily audible in proper testing.

I'm not going to engage any deeper here, it will be futile anyway.

 

[KSTR]

Perhaps it was just he lack of PFFB in my Fosi V3 (Stereo) which results in a significantly more realistic frequency response of the B100 Monos which made the largest differences….