Woo Audio WA11 Topaz Portable Headphone Amp/DAC Review

[laudio]

2 pages of comments... not much interest in these products. Let's get back to speakers!

 

[IVX]

Guys, I remember PS-audio $5000 DAC measurement even worse and more expensive. Let's try to find something positive in Topaz portable, for example, 149mW@300ohm it's a lot, if not to say unprecedented power for 300ohm for a portable DAC!

 

[Tks]

Guys, I remember PS-audio $5000 DAC measurement even worse and more expensive. Let's try to find something positive in Topaz portable, for example, 149mW@300ohm it's a lot, if not to say unprecedented power for 300ohm for a portable DAC!

Don't even know what you would do with that much power tbh. Aside from Sennheisers and some older 600 ohm headphones, headphones as well as IEM's these days do no require much power at all. This power game has become pretty silly if you ask me. Also, since this is a portable amp (and not a DAP) who really is going to be using their headphones of 300 to 600 ohms with this thing, most of those headphones aren't really of portable nature anyway.

You've seen for yourself, the beast of a DAC/AMP you've built. Many people just not needing that much power at all (but at least your device is a DAC + AMP in one portable package, and could basically power anything under the Sun, so it's a device where power can come in handy testing and taking all sorts of headphones everywhere and anywhere).

Btw IVX.. I was just wondering.. I've seen HEGEL in their DACAMP resort to equalized power with balanced and single-ended operation. Does designing something like that allow for more budget of making a better performing device (since you don't have to kill yourself trying to make the device as powerful as you possibly can, and straining the power source/PSU)?

Basically I am wondering, if you're designing a DAC or AMP, if you choose to purposefully not make it as power producing as possible, can you then take those savings and have a product that has cleaner performance metrics because you chose not to worry as much in providing all that power?

Power amps in my opinion all seem to suffer from this dilema. The more power they try to offer, the worse their performance seems to be. Or am I thinking about this the wrong way completely, and power output doesn't matter at all if you're trying to reduce noise and distortion?

 

[Jeffri]

Thanks Amir, this is what I'm looking for, I have this amp and always wonder how it measures. It sounds good to me subjectively, but still disappointed with the poor measurement.

Would you be able to show SNR on the balanced out? Also maybe the balanced output @33ohm on high gain performance graph? I wonder if the balanced out high gain really go as high as 1.2W @30ohm.