Topping LA90 Review (Integrated Amplifier)

[Mnyb]

You can already tell some competing companies were anxious... Also I bet you if a western company developed this, it would be praised like no others.

Not in my case . I’m a happy owner of a topping DAC which I could praise all day long.
But this amps simply is underpowered for the task of driving today’s typical low sensitivity loudspeakers in midsized rooms , which is my use case . Add some room eq and it to wants some headroom.
If I powered nearfield speakers on my desktop? Bu then I would by a nice pair of active speakers .

So this product is more of an engineering excercise than something I can use . The Engineering is remarkable but for what purpose , what’s the use case .

 

[PeteL]

You can already tell some competing companies were anxious... Also I bet you if a western company developed this, it would be praised like no others.

Why do you say that, Topping DACs and Headphone amps are universally praised. This mis a polarising product because of the limited usability. Any integrated should have ways to have a sub out, the weak power, etc. Don’t make this political, it has nothing to do with that.

 

[GeekyBastard]

Are you sure that the country of this amplifiers has something to do how it's seen by potential customers?
I think that its is weird design choices.

It's just me reading the room, people were being unnecessarily harsh towards Chinese made Hi-fi equipment, and extremely tolerant towards non-Chinese made stuff, just look at reviews of things made by JDS and SMSL/Topping for example, low SINAD JDS DAC? Sure, we're not competing in this SINAD war, good job JDS, SMSL DAC missing a small function? That's a dealbreaker, Chinese high SINAD DAC means nothing to me etc etc..

 

[ObjectiveSubjectivist]

Don't watch TV.
World is not as cruel place as you was told.
People are not so xenophobic as you think.
I guarantee you that country of this amplifier has nothing to do how it's seen.

 

[GeekyBastard]

Why do you say that, Topping DACs and Headphone amps are universally praised. This mis a polarising product because of the limited usability. Any integrated should have ways to have a sub out, the weak power, etc. Don’t make this political, it has nothing to do with that.

Because some people were being unnecessarily harsh towards Chinese made equipment, it's nothing political, but biased judgement and tolerance.

 

[JSmith]

@JohnYang1997 well done, this is quite an achievement and thanks @amirm for the comprehensive tests.

Personally (if for my own usage), I was hoping for a bit more power, but the achievement stands none the less as it certainly is not easy to design an amp with such vanishing levels of noise and distortion.

I'll be interested to see what the next step is in this evolution from Topping.


JSmith

 

[Peternz]

You can already tell some competing companies were anxious... Also I bet you if a western company developed this, it would be praised like no others.

No, people would be scratching their heads and wondering what they hell they were thinking.

 

[abdo123]

Even 50W is way more than enough. Take a typical speaker, 85 dB/watt/1m and run it through a calculator. 50W will get you 95+ dB at a seating position 10 ft away. That's hearing damage levels after ~1 hr. I measured the level I usually listen at, and it's 70-75 dB, which felt like it was getting loud. That's like 0.1W of power, maybe 80-85 dB peaks (so 1-2 W). Amp power is WAY overrated... unless you like hearing loss (which absolutely no one should, this being an audiophile forum).

I’m sorry but 95 dB is not as loud as you think it is.

I’ve been to a rock concert recently with live instruments and all and the levels remained above 100 dB (A-weighted) for like an a hour and a half.

Granted i would not have these experiences more than once or twice a year, but at least i want my gear to be able to get there even for few minutes every blue moon for a song that i like.

Some people want to reach that level of realism, and the concerns are legitimate specially when you call the amplifier state of the art.

The Benchmark ABH2 was trully horrible with it’s 30$ per W, Topping adopting this as the new normal just to get the $$$ associated with the highest spot is respectable but will raise some eyebrows.

 

[rebbiputzmaker]

Doesn’t that depend on nature of “the art” though? Is “the art” chasing a metric none of us who aren’t EE’s had even heard of prior to Amir’s adoption of it here, or is it audible improvements to the fidelity of audio reproduction?

And realistically EEs do not care about this either even though they obviously knew what it was.
Sadly some have had to succumb, and (give the people what they think they want ). They know better as it’s not the only spec that matters.

This is almost like the beginning of Solid State audio . There was so much talk about low harmonic distortion and how much better it was compared to tubes, but it sounded sooooo bad. People ran out of the room when listening to some of the first SS stuff on the speakers of the day. The early SS stuff sounded like death rays, even as the sales people would try to convince customers that this is the latest and the greatest. The… State of the art… Lol

 

[Nzama]

I don't have permission for that.

Maybe we shall donate more to sacrifice one to teardown

 

[voodooless]

I’m sorry but 95 dB is not as loud as you think it is.

I’ve been to a rock concert recently with live instruments and all and the levels remained above 100 dB (A-weighted) for like an a hour and a half.

No problem: just get one pair of those close to 100dB efficient speakers they had at the concert and hook up the LA90

It’s all about making choices, and these days it’s out of fashion to have large efficient speakers in your room, so high-powered amps have become the norm.

As simple as it is to call out lower powered amps, I can just as well call out low efficiency speakers. It’s neither here nor there…

Powering a 95 dB efficient speaker with the LA90, it would be the same as powering a 85dB efficient speaker with a 10x more powerful amp.

 

[Talisman]

All very nice, stellar sinad low distortion and bla bla bla .... but honestly I don't find the added value of this product now. It's basically a power amp (with adjustable volume option) but the power is incredibly low for stereo use (pretty much the same performance as the pa5 but for less than half the price), you can use it as a monoblock, but even so the power is certainly not stellar, the performances are superb but with a big question mark on the ability to drive difficult loads, while a purifi module costs less, has much more power, manages up to 2 ohms without problems with presumably the same performance perceptible. And let's talk about reliability, the pa5 received the same enthusiasm at the presentation but now problems are popping up whose nature is not well understood, honestly before buying two very small monoblocks and dangerously susceptible to overheating in class AB for topping I would expect at least six months / a year, because € 1600 is not € 350, and I would be very disappointed if I had reliability problems at this figure. at the moment my rating is "fine" with a big asterisk on long-term reliability

 

[PeteL]

Doesn’t that depend on nature of “the art” though? Is “the art” chasing a metric none of us who aren’t EE’s had even heard of prior to Amir’s adoption of it here, or is it audible improvements to the fidelity of audio reproduction?

Let’s take a step back. Using the latter definition of “the art,” a SOTA home audio system in this age is probably defined by 2 things: multiple subwoofers and advanced room correction to clean up room response up to the “statistical” frequency region in that room. Let’s set the former aside, as most people seem to use closed-system (amp/cabinet/driver) subs. Room correction, at its core, is a trade of system headroom for response linearity. The less headroom available, the more constrained that trade must be. So power requirements for a SOTA system are higher than they are in a lower fidelity system. Is 36W/8 Ohms enough? For a desktop system, probably. For 86dB/2.83V speakers 4m away? Personally I’d want 6+dBW more amp headroom (and speakers that can handle it). Note you can have big power with sky high SNR. The ATI Signature line, for instance. It costs, in money and mass, alas.

Good point for the second paragraph, but of course engineers care about Sinad. You realise it’s the same as THD+N right? That’s a key metric, there are many others. just maybe that at a certain level it becomes a bit futile to go further just for the sake of it. IMO.

 

[Nzama]

@JohnYang1997 finally came out with the long teased ABH2 competitor. Though this seems like a stop gap considering the meager output power everyone seems concerned with. But an integrated PSU, and getting motorized controls while upping the power output makes me wonder how much it's going to cost.

I will say, I really dig the look, but I really want to see internals. Seeing as how Amir mentions it goes into temperature protection, and I see no appreciable heatsinks protruding on the exterior.. this seems like the common typical fail as seen with most audio product thermal designs where you rarely see any over-engineering (and if there is some, it's usually accompanied by 'meh' implementations of active cooling using parts more fit for server rooms than living rooms).

@amirm Quick question, I see the supposed High Gain in the graph, but I'm not really seeming much difference with power output. Is that supposed to be this way, and if so, what's the point?

Have a look on audiophonics... They have a couple of images of the heat sinks and chadsis

 

[srkbear]

Not in my case . I’m a happy owner of a topping DAC which I could praise all day long.
But this amps simply is underpowered for the task of driving today’s typical low sensitivity loudspeakers in midsized rooms , which is my use case . Add some room eq and it to wants some headroom.
If I powered nearfield speakers on my desktop? Bu then I would by a nice pair of active speakers .

So this product is more of an engineering excercise than something I can use . The Engineering is remarkable but for what purpose , what’s the use case .

I’m with ya, and I’m a Topping DAC owner as well. I doubt this piece is going to find a market, but I think it’s evidence that Topping is striving for something—and I have a lot of anticipation for where this is going. They’re obviously jazzed by the records they’ve broken and I’m hoping they’ve got one in the pipeline that’ll knock it out of the park.

 

[chych7]

I’m sorry but 95 dB is not as loud as you think it is.

I’ve been to a rock concert recently with live instruments and all and the levels remained above 100 dB (A-weighted) for like an a hour and a half.

Granted i would not have these experiences more than once or twice a year, but at least i want my gear to be able to get there even for few minutes every blue moon for a song that i like.

Some people want to reach that level of realism, and the concerns are legitimate specially when you call the amplifier state of the art.

The Benchmark ABH2 was trully horrible with it’s 30$ per W, Topping adopting this as the new normal just to get the $$$ associated with the highest spot is respectable but will raise some eyebrows.

Rock concerts are poor examples of what a good listening room is. I was at one recently as well and measured 100+ dB on my phone. I, like the performers, were wearing musicians earplugs. I, like the performers, would like to have good hearing when I'm older, thank you very much. Let's not use a place, which will eventually ruin your hearing, as a reasonable point of reference. BTW you weren't hearing an iota of the actual live instruments there; rather you were hearing whatever came out of the excessively loud PA speakers. But why stop there? Gunshots are >140 dB, do you really want that level of realism in say movie/theater applications?

 

[HammerSandwich]

@amirm, any chance you can test a single-ended input to see if there's any difference in output?

Gain switch is nice to have though more options than just 10 and 20 would be better. Maybe a 15 and 25?

High gain's +20dB is 10x voltage, so a typical 2Vrms source would be boosted to 20V (obviously). 20Vrms is 50W into 8 ohms, so high gain's good there.

4V balanced sources max out at 20W into 8 with low gain, however, and could push 7+dB into clipping with high gain. That said, if any amp has SNR to spare...

 

[BoredErica]

For me the difference between this and pa5 is, pa5's cost is quite low. (yeah, yeah, some people are gonna say pa5 is overpriced) But this is the opposite. It's very expensive for the amount of power, with less power than pa5. At least match the pa5's power imo. I'd be more willing to pay extra for brand if I really trust the QC but with what's happening with pa5 I don't think I'm currently willing to do that.

 

[HammerSandwich]

2R testing might be somewhat useful for the autosound arena, but not for home HiFi. It's just silly.

I agree completely, John.

Now, let's see some 4R testing in mono mode.

 

[theREALdotnet]

56 watts ought to be enough for anyone.