Topping DACs?

Just a random thought.

Topping with AKM, or AKM in general, wasn't my cup of tea. But beside being ChiFi, the specific product I am having now (DX3; AKM4493-based) sounds very in line with RME ADI2dac I owned before (in both strengths and weaknesses), and FWIW a bunch of people like how RME sounds. I am not sure how close more later Topping-AKM products are to RMEs but that can be one explanation. I bet they are in the same shit category.

 

Copy imitation of glorious inter ant monitor making euphemism sound harmony toward glue ear

 

Guffaw... That might be the best imitation of chi-fi nomenclature ever.

 

I have an SMSL A50 for my desk speakers and it sounds pretty bad. I thought it was ok until I put a true class AB amp in it's place and the difference was huge.

Eventually I'll replace it with an Emotiva a100 or something similar. Maybe Schiit will make that 50 watt desktop amp they've been saying isn't going to happen and I'll get that.

 

@Torq wrote elsewhere the D90 sounds the same as the new RME ADI 2 DAC. If one wants this sound the RME seems to be a much better deal with the additionalfeatures, support and service.

 

Yes, throw it out, get some MSB goodness.

 

Make no mistake people, D90 is their best product and, in all accounts, the only good product i've heard from them but it costs 1/3, if not 1/2, more than it should. It has good features but the sound doesn't impress and, in the grand scheme of things, it's our number 1 priority right?! It actually is solid piece of gear, just needed a tweak in price.

Built of this unit, was good, i don't really like the aesthetic part of it but the thing was well built and had what (many) people would want but the sound is NOT impressive but NOT impressive doesn't mean bad or mediocre, my own Black Laber does not impress me for the MRSP (i think around 700) but it damn does it for the almost 400€ i payed, which, incidentally is 2/3 of it's retail price, and that price difference makes it a very, very, good option and it's the same situation with the D90, it just doesn't impress me and for 800€ (instead of the 500€ it should, tops) you better damn impress me.

 

Your grandmother was very likely struggling with beep-only-quality PC sound, which only got slightly better with the addition of a dedicated board. Like me, back then, she was probably wasting her pennies on those "upgrade" soundcards until she spent as much again on one RME board, sighed sweetly, and sat back to enjoy the music. She too, probably, knew about Lynx, but hey, we both knew about Rolls Royce and Bentley too, but were never going to get to drive one. The Lynx card was a thousand quid! In the previous century!

But then, possibly, even later in life, with more HF hearing loss, she too might have been disappointed at the experience of plugging her HD800 into
the ADI-2. Or perhaps she was lucky enough (in a way) not to have lived long enough to suffer that disillusionment.

Hats off to your grandmother. It is a shame she is no longer with us: she would have been a great contributor to the site

(The other company that made a decent internal sound board that didn't cost one's life savings back then, was M-Audio.)

 

-128 dB SINAD? Let me see here... I’m sitting in a 25-30 dB(A) environment (according to my watch). I’m listening to modern music compressed down to a 10 dB dynamic range with open headphones. The volume is approximately 65-75 dB. My tube amp has a SNR of maybe 93 dB...

Ah F**k the math- I need one.​

 

Lol! I got me one of these Bill Cosby dac cards for my nightstand Asgard for exactly these reasons. You think when I wake up in the morning my backside will hurt? Oh well, the things we do for a good night's sleep...

 

@bboris77 :

First, @Psalmanazar called your OPINIONS retarded:

"Your opinions are delusional, misinformed, and retarded."

He did not say "you're a retard" or "you're retarded."

Second, pulling the racist card is weak, and tells me you've got nothing substantive to counter Psalm's diatribe against your opinions and audio gear made in China.

Try not to resort to accusations (insinuated or direct) of political incorrectness and racism just because someone attacks your opinions (albeit in a rather blunt manner) - it reflects poorly on you, and it will result in additional abuse directed your way.

 

I think people have developed some skill over getting subtle or not so subtle hints on what is worth looking into based on preferences. No one is keeping anyone from learning or educating others. I am all ears usually. So it seems its build quality is decent. Great, based on members' opinions here who have a decent experience with gear I am never going to get it. Do what you will in this regard. Waste of space this thread, but people can make their own conclusions and maybe get something useful out of it.

 

Fair point. He did not directly refer to me as such. Some others have. I lost my temper and told them off. I am genuinely sorry that I let it get to that point.

I just wanted to clarify that I did not call him racist either. I was talking about the undertone in this thread. Maybe I should have said "anti-Chinese" instead of "racist". I get where a lot of people are coming from with their distaste for cookie-cutter Chi-Fi designs that apply to newbies and measurebators. I am neither of those. I am just open-minded enough to give them a shot and trust my own ears. Dismissing products without even listening to them just because they are designed by Chinese engineers is what got me annoyed. Just because they are Chinese does not mean that they are incapable of designing a proper DAC or an amp for that matter. China is a huge country and it is dangerous to generalize that all Chinese audio companies are the same and that they all produce garbage. If this was true, why are we even talking about this?

Dismissing products without listening to them based on a set of preconceived notions effectively becomes similar to the ignorant mantra propagated at ASR where they don't even bother to listen to stuff if it measures "badly". I regularly get criticized there for having subjective opinions and even entertaining the possibility of measurements not being able to account for all the sonic nuances that a DAC or an amp produces. I thought that this forum was more open-minded than the ASR, and I still hope it is.

And yes, I decided to stay on these forums after thinking it over because I love Schiit products and there are a number of great people here. I also hate political correctness and get that these forums are a bit of free-for-all in terms of language. I just did not expect it considering the fact that I was just trying to provide feedback and stay open minded about all kinds of products. I am choosing to see this as my baptism by fire even though I have been here almost 5 years! I will probably continue to piss people off here (and other forums) by challenging their beliefs. I don't do this because I am a schiit-disturber by nature, but because I do not like any form of absolutist approach to ideas.

 

A lot of us have heard plenty of Chinese gear. For instance, I really enjoy my Fiio M11pro with my Oppo pm-3, but my Topping was an ok sounding dac built like trash. Smsl has better case work than topping, but the same cookie cutter designs, with horrible customer service. It is a bias that comes from experience.
And since you cooled off and came back to your senses and decided to stay, maybe you're not retarded...

 

It hilarious that they, the weebs and the audio mullah and his gang of objectivist jihadists, engage in specsmanship because their recordings are already distorted from the build up of analog gear distortions (even if stored and converter back and forth a few times). those digitally processed (digital storage is cleaner than tape) without that build up of analog or analog type distortion sound worse for whatever reason.

I think it's partially to aliasing and IMD and massive buildup of odd order partials in shitty plugins attempting non-linear processing. PCM is just an intermediate stage, the wave form only exists in the wire of the converter after the filter and most of them do not take into account the behavior of acting upon an analog waveform instead of numbers. You have to add distortion for it to sound clean. Contrary to internet newb and digital modern record producer with Waves Ultramaximizer limiters on everything opinions, most plugins suck ass. The clean plugins attempting non-linear processes that do not produce any harmonics sound dirtier than clean analog gear. They'll often add in only odd order harmonics, making everything worse. Especially the ones given away for free in DAWs. The guys who write the non-linear plugins that actually sound fairly realistic are programming savants, mostly don't work for big box corporations, and are just adding in distortion in their own special ways. It's impossible to truly emulate many pieces of analog gear digitally and they know this so they make an analogue to the analog.

High rez won't save the specsmanship jihadis waging holy war on things that sound good because they're not getting laid. Higher sampling rates without proper high pass filters on everything will pretty much introduce massive IMD into the audible band. Since everything popular is hitting a shitty limiter now. This is DIGITITUS in action. There is no digital cleanliness beyond getting it in the box and applying a simply eq because that's the cleanest storage method we have. Digital, that is non cramping digital (lets not get into this), is awesome at stuff like basic eq, delay, increasing gain (mostly) but it can't really do a lot of cool stuff. It hits a brickwall. literally.

"Audibly transparent" basically doesn't exist with the available human mediums we have for processing sound. Add to that the ayatollah's acolytes are using heavily dsped, class d amplified, woefully underduilt speakers with detail free compression driver tweeters for home theater and background listening... they're not hearing jack and shit and lack the attention spans to perceive the difference. Then they hate on things that will tell them the difference like how chinless dweebs on the internet hate attractive women.

Also, it’s not possible for anything else to sound identical RME. Just also lofi. Different analog stages, Proprietary on board dsp with their own digitally synthesized clock, their own design on board power supplies, etc. most of these aren’t very good. RME isn’t good but it’s better than budget chifi and the awful older UAD Apollos. I highly doubt the latest topping with the newest chip will do that compact, cleanish but not clear, neutralish but imposingly colored, texture-less bass and treble and wrong midrange, like an RME converter. I have my suspicions on why they suck (dsp, power supplies, aliasing) but it’s the entire design and I’m not an EE or Electronics designer. RME used to be even worse.

RME can’t hang with the best of china (Focusrite Rednet, Holo Spring) but does beat down AliExpress. Behringer gear is often much better than AliExpress. The Focusrite Dante gear is much better than RME. Even the Claretts sound much cooler. The Holo Spring reclocked not off USB? Hell yeah it's awesome. Made in China by Chinese people who know what they are doing and are really good at it. AliExpress gear just makes them look bad and makes insult to Chinese civilization. Same with the CCP forcing peasants to plant rice in a way that the rice wouldn't grow back in the 50s. The Great Leap Forward. We are judging China by apparatchiks and AliExpress audio gear. That's the image the CCP is projecting upon the world, not of audio gear that costs the average Chinese factory worker's annual salary. I bet you in a few decades we're going to find out the CCP put straw in the concrete like in the former Eastern Block.

 

What Topping DAC did you have?

I had one D30 that died within minutes after powering it on last year. The replacement D30 worked well but sounded boring. I also tried the D50 and the D50s that worked out of the box but were very anemic sounding. The D50s was better but I still prefer the AKM sound.

In terms of customer service, I always bought from Amazon, so no issues with returning. I had a couple of questions for Topping about the D70 and they got back to me within a day and were pretty competent answers. Never had to ship anything back to China, which I believe would be a big inconvenience compared to dealing with domestic companies. Keep in mind, it is a bit of a headache for us Canadians to ship things back to the US, but nothing compared to China.

My biggest problem with Topping is that they seem to be driven by measurements primarily and the fact that their prices are becoming too high for non-discrete, non-original designs. There was that well-documented fiasco with their DX3 Pro V1 which had a significant failure rate. They eventually issued the V2 version which did not break within weeks but had a totally different headphone output stage with high output impedance. Funnily enough, the V2 never got measured over at ASR.

 

I had the D70 to compare with the Bifrost 2.

 

I have compared the two as well. At one point I had the Modi 3, the Bifrost 2 and the D70. Honestly, the comparison was much closer that I thought it would be, and this is with the HD800s and The Asgard 3. I am not sure I would be able to A/B them 100% of the time.

Just out of curiosity, what was wrong with the D70 case? I actually really like mine as stated before, but I know it is subjective.

I ended up returning my Bifrost 2 as one channel developed a weird buzzing noise at high volumes and the casework was not great - the front panel came with manufacturing scratches around the led cutouts and the USB input sign was torn. The Bifrost 2 sounded good, but the D70 held its own sonically. For me, there is no question that the Modi 3 is the best bang for the buck of all DACs I have ever owned. If it was not for that damned RFI interference in my house, I would have just kept it. And it is not because of my speakers that I pick up that RFI - it is also picked up through headphones. When I install my setup in the basement, there is no interference. My audio room is on the second floor where RFI is much worse.