Topping D90SE Review (Balanced DAC)

[Billy Budapest]

Hmm. I see 4 opamps for i/v, 2 for SE out, 2 for Vref.

Well, I was counting the total number of IC’s—31 not counting the DAC chips. Doesn’t seem very discrete to me!

 

[Freckles.Mcgee]

Absolutely no such issue,After the M500 incident, I used the same conditions to measure more than 20 DACs, including the D90se.

Can you give some specifics? Like a list of DAC's tested? Was the problem only affecting the SU-9 and the M500? Did you happen to also test the Gustard X16? Your site gives a short "preview". I'm not sure if a final review was done.

Thank you for another resource for measurements!

 

[jmillar]

OK now that the audio DAC is a solved problem w.r.t measurements (I guess it has been solved for a while w.r.t audibility), I'd say almost the same for the amplifiers.

Please dear R&D departments of all audio companies turn your resources to the weakest part of the audio chain (and stop trying to break all ready broken barriers). Speakers!
We need to see this affordable, technically outstanding performance (good and/or constant directivity, low distortion, high spl) for speakers (instead of th hiese 10k$+ product mostly targeted to the almost niche audiophile and just wealthy but not so audiophile crowd).

The last frontier is the "battle for the transducer" The loudspeaker (and headphones) companies have a long R&D road ahead of them to match the level of optimization made in the rest of the chain.
The countries that have invested more in audio research may have comparative
advantages. So do those with a long tradition of audio research, both in academia and in successful startups. A lot of the tech is already there, but it needs to trickle down from ubercostly studio monitors to the listening room. Economies of scale need to kick in.

 

[jmillar]

funny, I saw in the publicity of the product to advertise its preamp capabilties with some Genelecs. That's definitively a great jump upwards.


@Amir,

could you test the bluetooth?. More a more products have it. How BT progresses compared to USB?.

Wireless is problematic as long as BT is a chokepoint. It has to be reengineered to accomodate the bandwidth and SQ of true contemporary Hi Res Hi Fi. The best codecs available today are a brave effort but they don't go far enough. It's absurd considering all that has been accomplished in wifi and 5G.

 

[oursmagenta]

The last frontier is the "battle for the transducer" The loudspeaker (and headphones) companies have a long R&D road ahead of them to match the level of optimization made in the rest of the chain.
The countries that have invested more in audio research have comparative
advantages: CA, DK... So do those with a long tradition of audio research, both in academia and in successful startups. A lot of the tech is already there, but it needs to trickle down from ubercostly studio monitors to the listening room. Economies of scale need to kick in.

I totally second the last part of your comment. The techniques from kii, d&d, genelec, etc... needs to be used in products that should have sell count numbers maybe one order of magnitude higher to smooth out the big R&D cost + the cost related to small volume production.

I guess that's where ASR could be a huge leverage (as maybe it was for dacs and amps), by pushing us, consumers to really prefer and chase well engineered (and that measure well) speakers (transducer + baffle). And eventually shift the market all together toward this kind of product.

After that well, I think we could say that the job of ASR is done, close the forum and send one million dollars (don't ask how I came up with this number) in gold plates to @amirm for service rendered

 

[poopy]

It looks quite nice but I am not convinced if I got it if I could tell the difference over my current Topping D30.

You certainly won’t hear any difference unless 1 one them is broken.

A few people on this forum (audiophiles apparently) had the SMSL SU-9 with a true SINAD < 80dB and have never noticed anything.

Even though you do buy this DAC, your amp will likely have a SINAD around100 dB at most (unless you have an AHB2) so the resulting SINAD will be 100dB at most.

 

[jmillar]

Wow.

@JohnYang1997 when it this DAC performance going to add powerful headphone output/s inside same box ?

That would be a hypothetical "DX90", a (Streamer?)/DAC/PRE/HPamp combo: a machine set to seek first place in this category of products. In the meantime the new dac is a neat stack fit with the A90 hp amp

 

[nhs]

I read on soundness.net
"For the first time ever, Topping replaced its regulated and linear toroidal transformer with a Meanwell switching-mode power supply and while that might sound like a downgrade, Topping replaced its tiny voltage regulators with bigger and much higher-performance Mornsun 3W isolation transformers (DC to DC converters) that bypassed the need of big electrolytic capacitors. That’s right, you won’t find big ELNA or Nichicon electrolytic caps, as D90SE doesn’t need any of that!"
Is there any reason, why Topping did it so?
Perhaps because of cost reduction?

 

[dorirod]

A few people on this forum (audiophiles apparently) had the SMSL SU-9 with a true SINAD < 80dB and have never noticed anything.

true SINAD? Is that like a true scotsman? Amir showed it at ~120.

 

[amirm]

Perhaps because of cost reduction?

Switching power supplies tend to be free of mains noise and as Benchmark as shown, can be the key to highest performance audio products. They are also universal as far as input voltage. I can't tell you how many products I have received from China that were set to 240 volts and would not power up until I discovered the switch underneath.

 

[mocenigo]

Same. While we can certainly admire the quality of the implementation, I don't think there is any value in chasing SINAD for the end-user.

Let's face it: most Hi-Res music is essentially a ripoff.

If it were "just" upsampled music, which you can easily recognise with a sound editor because all frequencies are under a certain frequency and everything else above is absent. But you can even find something like this:

This is a horrible example from a commercial 96/24bit download. There is actually no content above 24Khz, what you see is a very strong image of the original signal below the 48khz frequency (the nyquist frequency corresponding to a 96khz sampling rate), I wonder how this can happen. The sound must have been played through a very bad NOS DAC and then re-recorded. Perhaps to do mixing in the analog domain? This is just a hypothesis, and quite an unlikely one, to be honest, but overall I cannot see how they could generate such a monster. Any idea?

Fact it, it does sound better just decimated down to a 48K sampling rate... and it occupies less disc space!

 

[nhs]

Switching power supplies tend to be free of mains noise and as Benchmark as shown, can be the key to highest performance audio products. They are also universal as far as input voltage. I can't tell you how many products I have received from China that were set to 240 volts and would not power up until I discovered the switch underneath.

Interesting, thanks!

 

[Slayer]

D30 Pro is lacking BT btw. At this point, assuming the DAC meets audibility threshold, it's become about features, support, price, etc. For this price I'd rather see SW out (and a way to implement the crossover to the main speakers) and some PEQ than more zeroes in THD+N. Nonetheless very nice achievement!

This ^^^^^^ a 100%. Topping should look at the Parasound Halo Pre's and do some tweaking with that design and feature set.

 

[Deleted member 31709]

Interesting, my HiFi buddy believes the same that discrete components hand chosen will have superior quality over the op-amps

It is true hand chosen discrete components for given application / topology will trump run off the mill op-amps, It is also easy to get things wrong in lesser hands.
I have personally never liked Topping's stock ESS based implementations (purely from sound quality perspective). But that's my subjective opinion. They seem to chase 5 leading 0s THD+N more than pleasing tonality.

I particularly dislike the use of OPA1612 in I/V stage - it is NOT a part meant for trans-impedance application. For I/V stage, if not using passive components, at least use parts with very high slew rates and bandwidth. Or implement ESS DAC in Voltage output mode.
Similarly OPA1612 is not an optimal (even TI does not recommend using it given the high input current noise) in LPF stages.

D50 (not D50s) particularly sounds horrendous!
Yes it can be made to sound better by swapping those parts with something else. And in the process it might drop a leading 0 (or 2) in the measurements which won't earn the product that high rank
Bottom line is - the company has good engineers in that they can churn out good measuring devices. It's about time they also invest time in extensive listening tests and see if it actually sounds good to human auditory system. Try comparing the sound with DACs which might not break records in measurement department but are highly praised for their sonic performance. After all, we don't listen to music via an AP analyzer.

 

[Spocko]

for the love of god, poweramp to complete this fairytale.

While we're on the subject of power amplifiers, let's shoot for the moon: at least 300 watts into 8 ohms and stable down to 2 ohms plus bridging capability for dual mono applications - and the standard to beat is the Benchmark AHB2 at one third the price.
That should keep them busy

 

[poopy]

true SINAD? Is that like a true scotsman? Amir showed it at ~120.

Look here:

https://www.audiosciencereview.com/...00-high-3rd-harmonic.22710/page-4#post-762180

 

[Spocko]

The last frontier is the "battle for the transducer" The loudspeaker (and headphones) companies have a long R&D road ahead of them to match the level of optimization made in the rest of the chain.
The countries that have invested more in audio research may have comparative
advantages. So do those with a long tradition of audio research, both in academia and in successful startups. A lot of the tech is already there, but it needs to trickle down from ubercostly studio monitors to the listening room. Economies of scale need to kick in.

Actually, companies like iLoud is on the right track following in the footsteps of Genelec, Dutch & Dutch, etc. so the recipe is fairly straightforward: waveguide + DSP = best sound. Genelec took it up a notch by making it coaxial and letting DSP fix the shortcomings of the coax but now you have amazing vertical directivity. The hardest and most expensive part is DSP programming - maybe Dirac or Anthem will license their technology for implementation by speaker companies?

 

[Spocko]

Won't say I won't.

That's all I needed to hear

 

[tmtomh]

If it were "just" upsampled music, which you can easily recognise with a sound editor because all frequencies are under a certain frequency and everything else above is absent. But you can even find something like this:

View attachment 136020

This is a horrible example from a commercial 96/24bit download. There is actually no content above 24Khz, what you see is a very strong image of the original signal below the 48khz frequency (the nyquist frequency corresponding to a 96khz sampling rate), I wonder how this can happen. The sound must have been played through a very bad NOS DAC and then re-recorded. Perhaps to do mixing in the analog domain? This is just a hypothesis, and quite an unlikely one, to be honest, but overall I cannot see how they could generate such a monster. Any idea?

Fact it, it does sound better just decimated down to a 48K sampling rate... and it occupies less disc space!

Looks like the imaging that has shown up in some MQA files.

 

[abdo123]

waveguide + DSP = best sound.

The Jury is still out on this btw, I know a lot of people (including Amir) find Speakers with wide (controlled) directivity more pleasant (not necessarily more accurate).