Give it a little bit of headroom rather than cutting it too fine, because you might not be able to always correctly recognise the distortion in your listening tests, whilst perhaps still having some distortion & degrading your sound, which might decrease your enjoyment of it even if you can't directly recognise distortion in your listening tests at that level.
Well, people come to different conclusions about whether you get best performance at 100% volume or not. There is some evidence & science behind running something like 97% windows volume rather than 100% on pretty much all DACS (delta-sigma type DACS). Also some DACS perform worse close to 100% output as can be seen in Amir's reviews. But music is not coded for a 100% signal all the time, so you're not always at 100% full signal, but you are bound to be at least some of the time. With the E30 DAC there's no point in running a huge offset of volume - I'd generally recommend just 97% on the Windows Volume Slider due to delta-sigma DAC, and then in your case you have the clipping issue due to what you're attaching it to, so in your case I'd just run -7dB to keep it at the same level as your apple dongle, and I would say that's for sure enough headroom over your tests too. (Run your DAC in 24bit mode to ensure volume decrease doesn't result in loss of dynamic range.....although if you're doing most of the attenuation in the DAC itself whilst it's in pre-amp mode it's possible that it's internal volume control might operate at 32bit or something even if you have windows at 16bit which would be fine, but no downside to setting windows to 24bit).
I've also just placed an order on shenzhenaudio.com, now thingers crossed that I wouldn't get stung by customs!
I know mine will not - there's importer now for Topping stuff here in Finland so 129,99 € inc. 24% VAT.I've also just placed an order on shenzhenaudio.com, now thingers crossed that I wouldn't get stung by customs!
Your miles may vary. But maybe you were lucky. I've had occasions too where I did not pay anything extra with an Amazon order (also from Shenzen). On other occasions with Amazon (also from Shenzen) I had to pay extra fees to DHL and import rights to the Netherlands, but it is not a given. It is just how lucky you are with border checks etc. By the way: it is not all included upfront in the price on Amazon. Read Amazon's fineprint about delivery from third parties
There are lots of known cases where people (also UK) had to pay extra import fees and even VAT etc. when ordering via a third party with Amazon. Next time when you order, your direct experience may differ
Authorized dealers:
Link please? Do you know if they can deliver to Sweden?
audiophonics.fr lists the silver E30 as "In Stock", and the black one seems to be "Available on order" (as I understand in 15- 25 days).
Seems to be Finland only.
You always lose SNR(equivalent of "bits") when turning down volume digitally. (Except for ess but that's a different story). Noise doesn't get attenuated, the signal does. Hence less resolution.102 pages of indescribable ... Oh man, what a ride it was... Anyway... Ordered the E30 2 days ago from Audiophonics, should be arriving today.
I'm really wondering why Topping chose the 2 MCU design? They clearly can modify the code of the Xmos code themselves if they can release a inversion fix within 2 days of reporting the "issue". The Xmos is a very capable CPU, it should have been no problem whatsoever to also have it control the dac, screen, remote and buttons.
BTW, regarding digital volume control. One thing nobody mentioned here is dithering. Instead of throwing away bits, when you lower the volume, what actually happens is that dithering is used to preserve some of the resolution by adding a bit of random (or noise shaped) noise and "encoding" the rounding errors from the attenuation into them. It's not magic, and you raise the noise floor tiny bit, but it will preserve waveform quite well. Best dithering uses noise shaping to push the noise up in frequency, and therefore making it inaudible. the perceived noise is then not even raised, but you do retain more resolution. Since a 24 bit DAC optimally has about 20 to 21 bit of actual content in them, one can easily use 1 tot 4 bits for dithering.
Obligatory cat image:
This is how it works on images with only a 1 bit. If you have a LCD screen, chances are you've been looking at a dithered for years. Most screens are only actually 6 bit per color, and are dithered to 8.. or 8 is dithered to 10 bit. Did you ever notice the noise?
DSD is also just a form of dithering btw. If you look at the SNR vs frequency graphs of a DSD signal you'll clearly see that the dithering noise is pushed far up in frequency.
Then I have to send my mom to Finland
She's Finnish and can travel in these Corona times.
