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Topping PA3s Review (Desktop Amplifier)

PeteL

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Out of topic, but does anyone know sinad numbers for amps in active monitors? For some reason many manufactures are hiding them......for example yamaha hs8. Can't find it. Or neumann, genelec, adam......I assume better sinad more transparent they are.
A point could be made that they don't generally need to be as good. The designer of the monitor don't have to worry about the amp he choses to be used with all kind of speakers, with all kind of impedances curves, all kind of sensitivity. He has full control on the gain structure and how volume control is implemented.. He have to choose the amp that has the single job than to push one single Driver, that is limited to a certain frequency range and which he knows exactly the behaviour because he measured it.
 

sarumbear

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Out of topic, but does anyone know sinad numbers for amps in active monitors? For some reason many manufactures are hiding them......for example yamaha hs8. Can't find it. Or neumann, genelec, adam......I assume better sinad more transparent they are.
Do you of any who states any SINAD or even noise figures separately?
 

sarumbear

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A point could be made that they don't generally need to be as good. The designer of the monitor don't have to worry about the amp he choses to be used with all kind of speakers, with all kind of impedances curves, all kind of sensitivity. He has full control on the gain structure and how volume control is implemented.. He have to choose the amp that has the single job than to push one single Driver, that is limited to a certain frequency range and which he knows exactly the behaviour because he measured it.
Not really. Wouldn't you want to know how noisy they are? Many amplifiers tested here to be found "hissing". I personally want to see that in the specs as SPL at distance. A decent manufacturer should declare it.
 

Tangband

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To be fair - the MA12070 class D chip used in Topping pa3s shows a better frequency response than Aiyima:s tpa3255 without dependence of the resistant load.

Maybe this is more important than tpa3255 having lower distortion in the high frequencies?
BD8F4E5D-DFD1-4142-BB13-C3A016341BDD.png
 

PeteL

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Not really. Wouldn't you want to know how noisy they are? Many amplifiers tested here to be found "hissing". I personally want to see that in the specs as SPL at distance. A decent manufacturer should declare it.
Sure, those figure are always important, but it remains that it's a less demanding task for the amp. Yes noise measurments as SPL at distance would be a great addition in the measurment suite at ASR. We should still judge the monitor as a whole, that's what comes out of the speaker that matter because the amp will never get used for anything else.
 

sarumbear

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Sure, those figure are always important, but it remains that it's a less demanding task for the amp. Yes noise measurments as SPL at distance would be a great addition in the measurment suite at ASR.
What do you say @amirm ?
 

Toku

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I received the PA3s and have been testing it for 36 hours in a row, but I can't hear any hiss noise when I put my ears on the speakers.
SMSL AO200, DA-9, SA300, SAbaj A20a, AIYMA A07 also have a low level but can be heard clearly.
But with PA3s, I can't really hear hiss noise no matter how many times I check it.
 

q3cpma

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Out of topic, but does anyone know sinad numbers for amps in active monitors? For some reason many manufactures are hiding them......for example yamaha hs8. Can't find it. Or neumann, genelec, adam......I assume better sinad more transparent they are.
Hard to know the implementation's SINAD without the manufacturer telling. Genelec states 0.05% of THD at 1/8 of the available power and the generated speaker noise separately (x dB(A) SPL at 1 m). Neumann specifies its amplifier power at fixed THD+N (i.e. "Output power woofer amplifier (THD+N with limiter deactivated: 0.1%)" for the KH120A) and self-generated noise in the same fasion as Genelec (at 10 cm, though).
 

Robin L

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This looks great for the money. That said, I'd love to see around $300 worth of Topping integrated amp: multiple inputs, line-level sub out, doubling up of bridged amp modules to double power. Would be a viable product. Throw in one of Topping's world-class DACs into the mix, stick the power transformers into the main chassis, charge around $400/500, would be very competitive.
 

Oukkidoukki

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That already started in 2019.
Cool , so you have been engineering it 2.5 years. Is it so hard? :)...Good that you are aiming to perfection. I am active monitor believer, but after I heard ahb2 I am not sure anymore. Maube i change religion.
 
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JDS

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We need to identify a prototypical speaker like we have with Sennheiser HD6XXX in headphone land. Then I can work on identifying satisfying level for it as far as power amplifiers.
And then you need a prototypical room, too. (Though maybe not for true desktop use.)
 

GWolfman

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Looks decent for my kids' room.
 

JohnYang1997

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Cool , so you have been engineering it 2.5 years. Is it so hard? :)...Good that you are aiming to perfection. I am active monitor believer, but after I heard ahb2 I am not sure anymore. Maube i change religion.
Actually started in 2019 December. High performance for one channel on a prototype board was done shortly after. There's a difference between making a working prototype without chassis like in the research and actually in a product. Our main difficulty is the balance between cost, size, heatsinking and performance in a final product.

Modulus 286 for example.


I want the final product to be as good as possible. It's often to see people DIYing putting high-performance modules together thinking it will perform just like in the datasheet, but not rarely they can get 10-20dB worse performance.

I worked on many other stuff during the time as well.
 

sq225917

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It's not an ncore, getting the text book specs is easy with Tom's stuff.
 

sq225917

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So, @JohnYang1997 according to your prices on Amazon you are selling this for EUR149 in Germany but also £149 (16% more) in UK. That is not going to endear you to us Brits.
Probably because they have a euro distributor and not a UK one, so it's euro price, - vat, + UK vat shipping and duty. So basically the same cost of goods, don't blame topping, blame the gammon twats who wanted brexit.
 

Yevhen

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Varying the frequency shows fair bit of ups and downs:

I don't understand that graph: upper, at 1kHz, performance was better. What changed?
Very often in the IC-based class D amps, the feedback loop is correcting distortion of the ferrite-based inductors at the output. You have distortion coming from both semiconductor part and output inductor. At some power levels (where we see the notches) they, probably, compensate each other.

Hypex/Purifi is covering entire amp with the feedback loop. That loop corrects the nonlinearity of inductors. Unfortunately, this makes the amp less stable in high frequency region.
 
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