Both look like they'd do the "job".
Well, maybe.
Imagine that you saw a review of a sports car from a very reputable tester. The car was great in every way. In addition, it was an absolute bargain. The tester found that the car could get to 100km/hr in 4.0 seconds, which isn't in the 3 second range of the really expensive guys, but for the price it's still magnificent.
So, you buy one with the intent of converting it to a race car in the appropriate category. Your first step is to test the car to get a baseline of where you're starting from.
You discover that no matter what you do, the fastest it will do 0-100km/hr is 4.8 seconds. This wouldn't matter for your ride to work, to the beach, or to the grocery store. But, it might not be so competitive as a race car.
Now, do you have a bad sample? Is something misaligned? Is it fixable? Was the sample provided to the tester a "ringer" and not representative of actual production units?
These are my questions.
I'm not suggesting that anything is underhanded or corrupt here. I just think that there may be something wrong with my unit. OK, maybe not wrong, but not optimized. Since both channels test pretty much the same, it doesn't seem likely to be a bad DAC chip or opamp. Besides, the noise performance is really great. Here, the 2nd and 3rd harmonics are worse than in the D10s sample I own. That doesn't seem right.
I know that ESS DAC chips use distortion compensation that can be tweaked and saved in the firmware associated with the chip. At least one manufacturer provides a means to do that at home. I'm hoping that Topping has something similar, or that somebody has figured out how to do it unofficially.