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Topping D70 DAC

Product with or without hires logos can be fully compatible. That’s not the case with mqa
Yes, but that's not my main point. My main point is
If what people care about is "the MQA processing pipeline needs money for licensing" then it seems to me that those people think the process is beneficial or useful.
If you are against MQA, then you should not own any MQA files or use any method to stream MQA at all, then regardless of the product supports MQA or not, you are not going to use it. Then is it important to care about MQA compatibility? Or do you think MQA itself is useful, but simply against its licensing model?
 
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IMO, MQA will go the way of Circuit City's DVD competitor, DIVX. But it's going to take longer because not enough people see the pitfalls in it. Unlike DIVX where everyone hated it. (No, I'm not talking about DivX)

Yup. Ultimately it will share a similar fate to HDCD, SACD, DVD-A, DSD etc... as it should.
 
I asked for more information from Topping on D70 and here is what they said:

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About D70, It is a 2 x AK4497 DAC, it comes without built-in headphone amp but has built-in linear power supply. Size of it is similar with DX7s. USB+COAX+OPT+AES+IIS+Bluetooth input, RCA+XLR output. It is still being developing now. We expected to be completed January to March next year.

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Pretty much same thing as SMSL M10 then right?
 
Wow. If the reality (including measurements) meet the potential of this product... Well, I will have to say "Come to Papa!!"

But if it is targeted for Q1/19, then realistically it will be mid-19 to early Q3/19, which, truth be told, will be just fine by my wallet...

On a tangential note, any sense if an A50 is still in the works, or would they simply synch product lines with an A70 instead to match the D70...? Hmmm...

Last time they told me A50 would come around the end of this year. :)
 
I asked them to support 16 bit PCM in their firmware (currently only 24 and 32 bits are supported). They told me their processor (xu208) is not powerful enough to handle 16bit playback. I told them that's not a reasonable explanation at all --- with computer science background I'm pretty confident that if a processor is able to handle 24 and 32 bits playback, handling 16 bits should be trivial. But somehow the conversation turns into a discussion that they are investigating adoption of faster interface processor (such as xu216) because they need more power to handle MQA support. So when upgrading to xu216 they are likely to support 16bit PCM playback.

They told me many users sent emails to them asking if a firmware update could support MQA when D50 was released. Strangely in recent months no one ever contacted them about MQA at all. But they believe many people may want MQA. I told them most of their customers come from this forum. The same time amir released his D50 measurement, there's another heated thread going on discussing about MQA. So many users may accidentally drop them an inquiry email, just out of their curiosity. But unless someone makes a wide reached enough poll, there's no evidence that most people need this technology.

They continued the discussion, mentioning all their major competitors are all working on MQA support, which make them nervous. They are afraid of losing advantage if they don't support MQA.

Hi-Res (such as DSD, or 96/24) music are useless as playback format (IMHO). But I am not against them. Thanks to its wide adoption in hifi community, now we have DACs of much higher quality. Today's DACs use 32bit floating point calculation, and have much higher internal upsampling rate. Those improvements greatly reduces noise. So even if you are not playing Hi-Res music at all, you still get these improvements in many scenarios --- for instance, you can set your DAC in very low volume, and still have CD linearity intact, thanks to the super low noise floor modern DACs offer. Those things were very hard to do a few years ago.

Hi-Res makes money flow into companies with engineering excellence. But MQA is not that kind of technology. It's not an open standard. Nor is it an improvement over the past technology. Rather, it's a new way to collect taxes from various parts of music industry. Other than that, its license term limits the user ability to transcode the music they purchase to other formats and play in non-MQA capable devices. You no longer owns your music. You own files whose playability are determined by a private company. DAC makers rush to support MQA not because it makes their product objectively sounds better, but because they are afraid of losing advantage to their competitors. It will become a disaster for the entire music industry if MQA goes mainstream. All customers lose.

MQA requires a licensing fee from device maker for each device that supports MQA. That adds extra cost to each device I purchase even I'm super against it. So I won't purchase DACs from manufacturers that supports MQA. Likewise, I will not purchase DACs from manufacturers who intend to support it --- I don't want their revenue, my hard earned money, being used to promote an evil technology that turns against me.

Thanks for sharing your thought on this.

From a business perspective, I can understand that why they feel pressured to support MQA. Though I understand your reasoning, I would be hard-pressed to boycott a company because its potential support of MQA, especially for a relatively small manufacturer which has a track record of producing quality products.
 
Pretty much same thing as SMSL M10 then right?

SMSL M10 has only one dac chip, and a very simple amplifier stage. Would be fun to compare their dac stages though :)

Theoretically the dual mono chip design if done well can help with some dB in SINAD/DR.
 
MQA is a post processing technology that alters the original audio signal supossedly enhancing it, in fact is a lossy audio format :

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_Quality_Authenticated

In fact you could also add a tube buffer to your DAC and enjoy the effect of compression and added 2nd order harmonics that give sound more 'body', then record the output and sell it as a 're-master', what would you think about it?.

In my opinion the less manufacturers that support something like MQA the better.
 
Also the only time MQA makes a big difference, is when the source file was mastered differently for the MQA release, which has nothing to do with the format! I have come across Russian torrents that have 'unpacked' MQA streams in flac format, which only proves it is a new kind of digital DRM in and of itself...

But we are getting off-topic I suppose :) ..

I understand that the Chinese don't want to lose customers over not supporting what the competition offers though, who uses DSD512 anyway? Same reasoning (although there, the 'larger number means better' logic plays a part...)
 
SMSL M10 has only one dac chip, and a very simple amplifier stage. Would be fun to compare their dac stages though :)

Theoretically the dual mono chip design if done well can help with some dB in SINAD/DR.
Ah, I see. Hopefully price isn't astronomical then lol
 
Looks like I missed the part that @yue asked for 16-bit support.

But "native" 16-bit support at the input side is not necessary at all. Higher bit-depths are compatible with lower bit depths. It is possible to convert a 16-bit file to 24 or 32-bit, then convert it to 16-bit again losslessly, a null test can confirm that.

https://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?t=85641

If people don't trust me, or don't trust the old Cool Edit/Audition software, they can also see what JDS Labs suggests:
https://www.jdslabs.com/pdf/instructions-el-dac.pdf
Page4:
For maximum signal fidelity, set the DAC to 24-bit audio and adjust digital volume slightly below 100% at your computer. Only control volume from your amplifier.
It is not specific to one DAC model, all of their DAC manuals say the same.

The rest of the DAC internal processing (filtering, upsampling etc) are not working at the same bit-depth and sample rate of the input data anyway.
 
This is a sure buy for me. I'm guessing they will also release a matching amp down the road.
 
Ah, I see. Hopefully price isn't astronomical then lol
Most dual mono AK4497 based DACs I've seen are quite pricey (except for the generic Chinese ones). The cheapest one I found is Singxer SDA-1 at $699. I'd be surprised if D70 can match that price with all the extra features they advertised (MQA?, fs clocks, linear PSU, bluetooth, multiple inputs etc).

EDIT: Scratch that, Singxer SDA-1 is AK4495 in dual mono. Next cheapest is Gustard A20H at $736.54.
 
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Also the only time MQA makes a big difference, is when the source file was mastered differently for the MQA release, which has nothing to do with the format! I have come across Russian torrents that have 'unpacked' MQA streams in flac format, which only proves it is a new kind of digital DRM in and of itself...

But we are getting off-topic I suppose :) ..

I understand that the Chinese don't want to lose customers over not supporting what the competition offers though, who uses DSD512 anyway? Same reasoning (although there, the 'larger number means better' logic plays a part...)
That's what I think. If people don't care about MQA, why care about MQA compatibility? If people don't like the MQA feature costs money then why they can tolerate that Hi-Res Audio logo simply because it doesn't need compatibility?
 
Yeah no. This will be topping's most expensive device, yet.
 
Thanks for sharing your thought on this.

From a business perspective, I can understand that why they feel pressured to support MQA. Though I understand your reasoning, I would be hard-pressed to boycott a company because its potential support of MQA, especially for a relatively small manufacturer which has a track record of producing quality products.

Perhaps it makes more sense to boycott Labels and Studios that produce MQA-enabled music. I don’t think the artists make any extra money from a MQA. I know they don’t make much (e.g. sub pennies maybe) from streaming services.
 
I'm guessing $399-499
That would be kind of insane considering how well the DX7S measures while including a headamp. $250 is the most I'd personally pay for a pure DAC, no matter how well it measures or what chips it uses.
 
Looks like I missed the part that @yue asked for 16-bit support.

But "native" 16-bit support at the input side is not necessary at all. Higher bit-depths are compatible with lower bit depths. It is possible to convert a 16-bit file to 24 or 32-bit, then convert it to 16-bit again losslessly, a null test can confirm that.

https://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?t=85641

If people don't trust me, or don't trust the old Cool Edit/Audition software, they can also see what JDS Labs suggests:
https://www.jdslabs.com/pdf/instructions-el-dac.pdf
Page4:

It is not specific to one DAC model, all of their DAC manuals say the same.

The rest of the DAC internal processing (filtering, upsampling etc) are not working at the same bit-depth and sample rate of the input data anyway.

> Higher bit-depths are compatible with lower bit depths. It is possible to convert a 16-bit file to 24 or 32-bit, then convert it to 16-bit again losslessly, a null test can confirm that.

I am very familiar what you're talking about. I worked on audio players many people use today, such as cmus and mpd. And yes in this sense it works the way you described. And I can even tell you that most codecs (such as flac) and operating systems (such as macOS) only process audio signals in 32bit. So even if you have a redbook CD and compress it using flac, when you decompress it the samples it returned from its API is entirely in 32bit.

> But "native" 16-bit support at the input side is not necessary at all

It is useful and necessary. 16bit support is more related to power consumption and backward compatibility. Topping offers many portable devices, such as NX4 DSD. 24/32bit requires significantly more USB power to transport the packet signal. So you may experience shorter battery life. Also some software (even some most commonly used ones, such as VLC player) do not handle higher resolutions well because their internal logic is not efficient, which may result to packet delay. Some software (such as BitPerfect) may crash if the DAC failed to match file's original resolution, such as 44.1khz/16bit.
 
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