Topping Pa5 "review"- Reign of terror.

See bottom for TL;DR.

This is a brief review of the Topping Pa5 amplifier, coupled with commentary on its... issues.

I purchased the topping Pa5 In late 2021; I paid $349 for it (MSRP). The Pa5 came in a choice of four colours, packaged into a slick little box. This little package packed a bit of a punch, with a rating of 65w rms at 8 ohms, and 125w rms at 4 (1% THD). It's quite bare-bones, with only two pairs of TRS inputs, a volume knob, front-facing on/off switches, and speaker outputs.​

To me, it sounded fine- It wasn’t dry, didn't do anything funky, had an inky black background, and had a great grip on the bass (the damping factor was actually pretty good). I even thought that it bested MA12070-based amplifiers and the like with better separation, staging, imaging, etc... of course, that impression came from a non-blind test during a time when I wholeheartedly expected the Pa5 to be audibly superior, so you probably want to throw that assessment out the window. What I can say is that there are similar-sounding amplifiers for far less than the asking price of this amp with the same amount of power, and tons more features. See the SMSL a300 as an example.

I was relatively happy with it for a while- it did everything that I needed perfectly...But then it failed. Twice. Both units failed in roughly the same amount of time, in the exact same fashion. After roughly 4 months of use with several active hours a day (3-6 hours of sending a signal through it), and 18-20 hours a day of average "on-time" throughout those 4 months. The left channel became unbalanced (quieter) and significantly noisy. This happened to me, as well as dozens of other people, as shown here: Poll for Topping PA5 owners. Lotta people experienced similar issues within a similar timeline. Most typically, people start running into issues as they approach or exceed 1-3 thousand hours spent with the device turned on.

It's probable that low quality and short lifespan devices used in the Amp started to fail after a few months. Here's a theory that one person thought up on the same poll from Asr ​

Ookay, that's pretty bad, but not exactly horrible, right? Wrong. It doesn't stop here. ​

Post by a Topping staff member in the ASR forums
In this post, Topping admits to seeing higher-than-normal failure rates in the Pa5, and justifies not recalling it by saying that it won't harm any devices other than itself. They went on to say they will fix the issues with the Pa5, and In their words, "As a responsible manufacturer, TOPPING will not sell products to the market knowing that there is a problem with them."

Hahahaha...​

About a month ago, I sent in my broken-for-a-second-time Pa5 to Apos audio, after noticing that the issue that I had once experienced had returned. Today marks the third week since Apos audio has sent any updates to me. A few days ago, I was wondering what was taking so long, and realized that the product hadn't even shipped. So I dug a little deeper.​

Apos audio removed the OOS/Purchase button for the Pa5 on their product page and stopped advertising the Pa5 purchase page on browsers. Hifigo de-listed their pa5 product page entirely, and most other retailers are pretty much totally OOS. As such, I reached out to Topping's sales team and Shenzen audio asking about the status of the product. Lo and behold, they said the Pa5 was discontinued. Very interesting, could it be because they didn't fix it after all? I've sent another email to Topping's sales team just to see what they have to say.

In conclusion, this excuse for a product found its rightful way into the garbage after just a year. With no direct successor in sight, but being superseded by a better, cheaper product (The a300) in just over 6 months, this product seems to have been solely intended to troll people. What will happen to the Owners? Dunno. Retailers dealing with RMAs? Dunno. Whatever, I guess.

TL;DR: There really isn't a reason for this amplifier to exist, as you probably know. The sound, power, and features it provided weren't ever particularly competitive for chip amps, and the value proposition for it got worse as time went on. Compounding this issue, units that were manufactured at least before July of this year have a high likelihood of experiencing failures, and these issues may just be present in all units ever made. Finally, topping recently pulled the plug on this amp after about a year on sale- with no clear successor- ending this stupid saga.

Edit#1: After looking a little more on the interwebs, I've noticed that the e50 and l50 are also on sale, and are noted as "final sale" on headphones.com... So, perhaps there will be v2 models for all. Sigh. Here's to hoping that they're less terrible.

Edit #2: Topping sales team has said that: "there is no new successor in the near future" In regard to the Pa5.

 

I also had PA5 early this year for a hot-season secondary power amp for my 2chs.. and it failed, too. Fortunately the failure (i.e., crackling sound in one channel) began to occur after two weeks of uses, I immediately returned and got my money back without hassles. Glad to hear pa5 is now discontinued.

Before it was broken, I generally liked how the amp sounded, which honestly led me rethink about Topping a bit (from sonic perspective). But this pa5 failure experience made me factor in failure risk when seeing their products. I'm having another (a lot more expensive) topping integrated amp that keeps functioning perfectly for 8 months. Not a few local pals own topping a90 hp amps for fairly long period without failures, either. I'm not exactly sure if the risk is company, product or line-specific. My bet is the risk seems greater with smaller and/or cheaper ones in their product spectrum due to heat and cost challenges.

Anyway if I have to shop (non-orfas price range) Chi-fi gears, I'd choose SMSL/Gustard over Topping because the former is more reliable in my perception and anecdotal experience.

 

Well, I don't believe there's ever been systematic issues with their higher-end products, only low/midtier, so you're probably right on the money. I definitely didn't have any issues with the way this unit sounded, but as previously mentioned I don't see a place in the market for it, anymore. Regardless, I've lost faith in Topping and a lot of Chifi companies in general. With companies like Schiit and Emotiva around, I feel heavily inclined to favor them.