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Topping E30 II DAC Review
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Trell
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Then there is the iPhone, not low budget, but certainly put together by very low paid workers in China under awful working conditions. So paying a high price for my iPhone does not mean decent pay nor working conditions.
In the U.S. - Maybe this would kills margins or etc, but I personally would feel a lot better buying topping gear from a big seller with rock solid customer support like Crutchfield.
Where's the evidence that these cheaper products have a higher failure rate than the more expensive products?
Herrr topping pa5?
respice finem
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The question is, how cheap is really too cheap. I agree we all should buy reasonably made goods, be it for the environment aspect alone.
My own experience: Got a class D amp at my workplace, playing internet radio in a waiting room, 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, for the last 12(?) years. No issues, stays "cold like a fish". It had cost 30€ if I remember well (made in China of course). Had an expensive Sony CD player (the 50ES) which failed three times, after warranty though. Each time, the laser pickup. Gave it away to someone proficient enough to adapt a third party pickup. A rather cheapish Sharp microwave runs (used every day) for the last 20 years, the (practically redundant) display is dead but otherwise no problems, even the light bulb is original. My mother has an inexpensive small "kitchen TV" from Sanyo, from the nineties (sic), which is soon to become obsolete because the cable signal will be replaced by IPTV, but it still works.
So, it's a lottery I think, even with today's devices, containing less mechanical parts. They should last longer just because of this, and the expensive ones even more so, but will they? Mobile phones show they can, if you don't smash them, they usually "live" until the software EOL defines their planned obsolescece point, though they are carried around and mostly not really expensive to make. How cheap is too cheap, and then, how expensive is too expensive? Because it can sometimes be highly price cr@p, too... OK not from RME or Benchmark, but the more "exotic" stuff, is sometimes, well, dodgy...
Ceterum censeo: caveat emptor.
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Agreed, the PA5 hasn't been Topping's finest moment!!! Nor was the L30 (early on). But what about the other Topping products? I'm not trying to defend Topping, just questioning the actual evidence.
diddley
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MAB
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I wish I could, but I obsess way too much on music
.For me, the PA5 was to use in place of an old Yamaha CA-2010 while I repaired it. The repair went quicker than I anticipated, and of course the PA5 lasted shorter than I wished...
For me, competition to the PA5 can be had for less than 20x. If SINAD is the only thing, then the PA5 is truly outstanding and the competition is indeed scarce! But I find lots of compelling gear in the ~100 Watt per channel range. Almost all with worse SINAD than PA5 for sure, but many with features that I wanted and would actually use.
Same for my A30/D30 Pro headphone stack. To me direct competition is the RME ADI-2 FS and it is only about 50% more than the cost of the Topping stack that I purchased. And of course you get some incredibly useful features with the ADI-2. I do appreciate these features way more than the performance, and the RME gear has equivalent or better performance in every area that I can see. And RME is really well supported in my area if something did go wrong, both the vendors and the company.
I'll be honest, I also really wanted to see how the PA5 compared to the CA-2010, my curiosity was part of the reason I bought the PA5. Part of me is just irritated I didn't get to even do that, but got instead drug into a maddeningly tedious and confusing warranty experience. And, I sunk about $350 USD each on a PA5, D30 Pro, and A30 Pro. In this experiment, 2 out of 3 are defective with customer service like a surreal fever-dream.
Even if I was totally able to treat this as commodity with inventory, it sucked up so much time to get to the point where I realized this wasn't worth the effort. And that's the problem with reliability issues, for many users the uncertainty around the defect is part of the value. If you are a big entity and can statistically manage systematic and random issues you have a chance. Once you know those issues and the fail rates, you can reduce it to a simple consumable and have Finance calculate the cost. Most people can't manage this way, and would just need to buy a second copy of everything, or pull the trigger on a second purchase the moment the first goes wrong.
So, to your point, I do wish I could reduce this to the nuts and bolts of a consumable...
But it seems I can't!
DanielT
Master Contributor
Partly, how does Topping compare to other brands, regarding reliability and lifespan?
Partly in absolute terms, what can one expect, per se, from a product?
My father said about buying a new car: Never the first year model, with its childhood ailments.
Perhaps it suited his time. That may be true even nowadays, also regarding HiFi/electronics? What do I know.
Partly in absolute terms, what can one expect, per se, from a product?
My father said about buying a new car: Never the first year model, with its childhood ailments.
Perhaps it suited his time. That may be true even nowadays, also regarding HiFi/electronics? What do I know.
57gold
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Local company contract builds electronics - tablets, phones and other consumer electronics for companies like Apple. It's a company with revenues in excess of $30 billion.
Spent some time with the head of production for that company flying home from the west coast. He was coming from China, where he employs @15,000 people in factories to make stuff. Asked if they had factories in US, he said wish they did, but if they had to add the costs of US production to his bids to folks like Apple, they wouldn't be getting any orders and go out of business.
Asked about the quality of work of the cheaper labor and he said it was pretty miserable, a very high percentage of products were discarded in quality control, the more stringent the QC process, the more rejects. But even with a high percentage of rejected product, the net cost even after the losses associated with the rejects, was significantly cheaper than US or European produced products.
Companies like Apple with Chinese production, the Mac Mini I use as a server and this laptop I'm typing on were dropped shipped from China after online ordering, insist on significant QC. Low cost products are QCed by the purchaser, much lower cost proposition. Most folks with a $200 electronics that break, junk it and move on.
MAB
Major Contributor
Agreed. We don't know the fail rate. And the 37% fail rate we get from the PA5 owners only poll thread is likely an overestimate of actual rate, I think we all acknowledge that. But, multiple acknowledgements of a technical problem now exist from the resellers and now from @JohnYang1997. And, there is a bunch of data on common pattern with the resellers and with the inability of @TOPPING-Service to respond. And, I respect the bind they are in, 37% of an ASR thread is angry at them!!! And John Yang acknowledged that bind too.
So, with that in mind I find Restorer-John's characterization fairly accurate (even if phrased in his typically semi-bombastic style):
There is certainly plenty of data on the left-out-in-the cold part of his statement.
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JDS Labs can manage it, so I don't consider it unreasonable to expect the same from Topping.
There’s a lot of “data” on @JohnYang1997 ’s post about what they have done (increased warranty period) and still trying to remedy the situation. That’s not the behaviour of a manufacturer leaving customers in the cold.
Bombastic writing shouldn’t skew reality.
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MAB
Major Contributor
Yes, and appreciate that.
I think the problem is the resellers have been leaving the customers in the cold. It's in the thread, if you have patience...
One of the themes that comes out of the thread is definitely left in the cold. I am still waiting for a reply from @TOPPING-Service to my PMs, or to respond to my posts on the thread. Scanning the end of the thread you will see posts from multiple bewildered members regarding this. And, it seems John even acknowledges his customer service agent is struggling:
So I am gonna stick to my guns and say left in the cold is a proper characterization. Extending a warranty didn't help here, actually feels a bit worse...
Has anyone found the E30 II for sale? I haven't.
Prana Ferox
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My early serial E30 has been working flawlessly since the E30 was released
I bought a E30 used last year so I don't know its full provenance, but it's been running roughly 24/7 ever since without issue
Lifu
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My E30+L30 is running 24/7 since mid-September 2020.
L30 got replaced in October 2020 because of the ESD.
Never had issues myself, but I was very pleased with Topping that I could replace it for my own peace of mind.
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