Topping D50 III Balanced DAC with EQ Review

[rcstevensonaz]

Ultimately the goal for these companies should be to release their dac or pre-amp with PEQ and and microphone which measures at the listening point.

Could the ultimate goal be to "release some of their DACs or pre-amps with PEQ and microphone ..."? I'm on the opposite end of you, where I only want a solid DAC ("100% volume"), no MQA, no DSP, and no volume knob on the front since the DSP and volume functions are handled much further down my audio chain. Of those, no MQA and no volume knob are the most critical.

At this point, the TOPPING D10 Balanced and D90 LE are the only options in their lineup for balanced output; with the addition of the E30 for single ended output.

 

[Hamrin]

PEQ is a mostly half baked feature here...
Well to be fair, the whole firmware looks still half-baked btw. I do agree, better use where you have more resources and power.
Nice utility for casual listening.

About the volume, the D50 III is a fixed output dac, the "preamp" is a digital attenuation, just turn it off and you're done.

I've owned both D10B and D90LE and to my personal taste this D50 sounds better.

I solved 12V trigger bug and USB stability changing both cables... Anyway the EMI/RFI is still there.

 

[VientoB]

I would like one of these but tempted to wait a couple of generations for the EQ system to become more developed

 

[rcstevensonaz]

About the volume, the D50 III is a fixed output dac, the "preamp" is a digital attenuation, just turn it off and you're done.

The volume knob — in my situation — is a humans factor issue (and also aesthetic). I refuse to pay for MQA license; and ideally prefer not paying extra for DSP capability that won't be used (though that is not that big of an issue). And sure, setting the DAC to fixed output is trivial and is easily done on all of my source DACs.

But I only want protruding volume knobs on the pre-amps / headphone amps that are actually used for volume control. All of the upstream source DACs should have a flush front since they are not part of my volume control, and adding more knobs (that are not used) is both a bad functional design but also an ugly aesthetic.

So my request is to keep at least one high quality, minimal featured DAC in the lineup that does not have a protruding volume knob. The D10B meets that for USB input, but I am forced up to the D90LE for balance output from S/PDIF digital inputs. To be clear, this is nothing against the D50 III... just in response to the person who requested PEC and microphone on all DACs.

Of course, I am also running into the opposite problem on the headphone amps that now rely on remote control and are ditching the protruding volume knob and front-panel switches... though at least the A30 Pro and L50 are still in TOPPING's lineup that I can use.

 

[VientoB]

Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think there is much of an MQA licence payment nowadays. MQA kind of died a death. Even the cheapest SMSL and Topping DAC can decode MQA nowadays.

 

[Bleib]

just in response to the person who requested PEC and microphone on all DACs.

Obviously it doesn't have to be there for absolutely all units. I own a SMSL SU-1 and I'm perfectly fine with it being very basic.

 

[Valvetubehead]

Attention shoppers… price drop
wallet lightened

 

[VientoB]

£229.00 on Amazon UK

 

[DantonIzzo]

Attention shoppers… price drop
wallet lightened

Yeah, I picked up the A50/D50 III stack that included RCA interconnects from Shenzhen audio's store on aliexpress during the summer sale. After coupons and coins, the bundle came out to $290. I thought that was a great deal. In fact, because of the discount, I thought I would just get the P50 linear power supply to go along with it (just because).

 

[VientoB]

Attention shoppers… price drop
wallet lightened

From what to what and where?

 

[Valvetubehead]

From what to what and where?

The usual price of $229 to $194.65 on Amazon US… looks like some online stores are matching.

 

[VientoB]

Amazon UK has it £194.95 actually. Good deal!

 

[phoenixsong]

What bluetooth codecs does this dac support?

 

[DantonIzzo]

What bluetooth codecs does this dac support?

All the usual including LDAC.

 

[dsnyder0cnn]

Just arrived last night from China. I ordered it before the sale went into effect, but Apos matched their current $194.65 sale price by issuing a credit.

Apos service has been hit-or-miss in the past year or so, but they were spot on with this order. Kudos to them for implementings service improvements!

I'm looking forward to comparing the D50 III to my SMSL D-6s. Feature set is a bit different, of course.

 

[DantonIzzo]

Just arrived last night from China. I ordered it before the sale went into effect, but Apos matched their current $194.65 sale price by issuing a credit.

Apos service has been hit-or-miss in the past year or so, but they were spot on with this order. Kudos to them for implementings service improvements!

I'm looking forward to comparing the D50 III to my SMSL D-6s. Feature set is a bit different, of course.

I think it's a really good dac. Once Topping update Topping Tune to be able to adjust gains by increments of .1, rather than .5, it will be even better!

 

[dsnyder0cnn]

Finally got the D50 III out of the box this weekend and took some measurements (using my little Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 gen 2 audio interface...nothing fancy). Per the manual, the DAC has eight modes, so I measured each of them.

1. Minimum Phase (Default)
2. Linear Phase Fast Roll-off Apodizing
3. Linear Phase Fast Roll-off
4. Linear Phase Fast Roll-off Low Ripple
5. Linear Phase Slow Roll-off
6. Minimum Phase Fast Roll-off
7. Minimum Phase Slow Roll-off
8. Minimum Phase Slow Roll-off Low Dispersion

What I see in REW matches these descriptions.

For these measurements, I played 44.1 kHz sweep in REW and sampled it at 96 kHz with the Focusrite. This is probably not the correct way to measure rolloff (most folks use noise instead of a log sweep), but I thought it was interesting that all filters except "Mode 2" show output continue after 22.05 kHz:

I'm not sure why this is. Could just be an artifact of how I took the measurements or how I created the sweep file.

All three "slow" filters show around 3% 2nd order harmonic distortion at around 14 kHz.

Looking at the impulse response, Modes 7 and 8 show the smallest amount of pre-ringing, but I would rule (along with 5) because of the added distortion from slow rolloff. That leaves modes 3 and 4, which are are identical in the time domain:

Based on all of this, I will probably put the D50 III in Mode 4 and leave it there for all of my listening.

Edit: REW Measurement Data: d50iii.zip

 

[ah-ra]

Sorry for the dumb question, but what I don't understand is, why the filters in the digital domain introduce noise.

I was thinking about getting a miniDSP Flex Digital to keep EQ digital, but am not sure now. Would bei interesting to see whether EQ will also produce noise in this device...

 

[Sokel]

Sorry for the dumb question, but what I don't understand is, why the filters in the digital domain introduce noise.

I was thinking about getting a miniDSP Flex Digital to keep EQ digital, but am not sure now. Would bei interesting to see whether EQ will also produce noise in this device...

Have a look in comparison with the RME:



RME



Topping

(link to the thread,there's some more there)

 

[ah-ra]

Have a look in comparison with the RME:

View attachment 383099

RME

View attachment 383100

Topping

(link to the thread,there's some more there)

Does that show the RME also with EQ on? Interesting....