I've been interested in sound reproduction since I was a kid, and started to take audio a little more seriously about seven years ago when I bought my first "proper" stereo system. This comprised of an Audiolab M-DAC, a pair of Adam A7x monitors and some mid level AKG headphones (forget the model), all were purchased after extensive research on the many websites of the time. Around the same time I started buying CD's and did a clean sweep of any MP3/AAC music I had. Since then I've been content, after a few years I stopped listening to the headphones for one reason or another but the monitors and the DAC performed flawlessly.
Close the end of last year we had a child and my wife started eyeing my hard black angular Adam's with a certain look, after some time she informed me that they would be relegated to a dark corner of our home away from public gaze. The thing that was needed were some more home friendly speakers that had grills to keep prying fingers away from them. Thus the rekindling of the sickness began, the search for new HiFi equipment. As part of this search I stumbled across ASR and what began as a quest for some child friendly speakers turned into a full blown case of audiophile nervosa which demanded the full treatment, a completely new system.
Since my last bout of this illness there were now a lot more numbers. Everything was being measured. I read Toole’s book, I joined ASR and I started digging through the many threads to find the perfect setup. The DAC, amp and speakers to complete the system that would be the one true system, both child friendly and bring me closer to audio nirvana.
The Amp was pretty straight forward, a DIY Purifi Eval-1 kit. There was very little debate on this, both the objectivist and subjectivist were on the same page. Transparent amplification, ran cold and produced significant output. Measured well, sounded great. It has no buttons, no interface but its a power amp, it doesn’t need any of that.
Speakers, Revels. No questions asked. After reading Toole’s book I was already predisposed to liking them. I found a pair for a great price and couldn’t ask for more. Measured well, sounded great, again it is a passive component, it does what it is supposed to.
Before completing my perfect system I also purchased some Dan Clark headphones, measured great, sound amazing, do exactly what you expect.
DAC. The chart topping company with several products in the top ten was, you guessed it, Topping. Never heard of them before, and I was skeptical at first. But after reading through countless posts on a several threads on their top end DACs I won myself over. Surely, all these people praising these products couldn’t be wrong. They even had panthers on them playing golf, that’s got to count for something. I decided to go all out and get the best of the best, the Topping D90 MQA, using the latest and greatest chip on the market. The second best DAC ever reviewed according to the numbers at the time and still in the top five compared to the latest reviews. There were also some from Gustard and SMSL which looked promising but Topping had the longest track record of producing well regarded products so it seemed like the safe bet. In addition to the numbers on ASR there were plenty of more objectivist reviews using lots of random words praising this DAC.
As there were a few weeks lag between ordering and actually receiving the DAC in the interim period I ordered a second Topping DAC, the D70s as I decided that in addition to having a new family friendly system I would also replace my ageing M-DAC. Considering the design is almost nine years old and its limited to 24/96khz over USB it just had to be inferior to a new topping DAC and thus based on the numbers had to go.
The D90 arrived and what can I say, it sounded great. It produced beautiful music. Around this time I decided if I was going to replace my M-DAC, which has a built in headphone amp I also needed a dedicated headphone amp to use my lovely Dan Clark’s with, so I ordered an A90.
The A90 / a dedicated headphone amp was never a product class I had a need for before. It was only purchased to fill a gap in the D90 and allow for headphone listening. On paper it is in the top five headphone amps measured and can output deafening levels with almost any headphone.
Back to the D90. It sounds great but that’s where the pro’s end. Yes, the DAC sounds great, but it is inferior in every other way to my M-DAC which was designed nine years ago and honestly I couldn’t even say that’s a real pro as I’d be hard pressed to tell them apart. Its not a passive component, its something you interact with and it was bad at this.
M-DAC
Pros
D90/D70s
PROS
A90
PROS
Both the Topping and my old M-DAC produce beautiful music, but the Topping can play back some seriously hi-res files so I must be able to get more out of it. Thats it though, in every other regard the Topping products which were amazing on paper, in real life felt inferior to a nine year old product. Nine years is a long time in the current technology landscape.
It wasn’t long before I spent more time on ASR and worked out that DSD was a waste of time, so that’s one plus taken away from the Topping. And a little while later, reading more about sampling theorem that I came to the bitter realisation that 16/44khz is genuinely enough for music playback, if you really want to stretch it, then heck, make it 24/96khz. Funny, that’s what my old M-DAC was capable of doing over USB, that’s another plus taken away from the Topping. Leaving it with a grand total of zero advantages and a whole bunch of negatives.
What happened? How is it possible that the highest regarded products on ASR could be so disappointing. Let me be absolutely clear, they don’t sound disappointing, they sound great, but so does my old DAC.
The madness of subjectivism, where audio hardware was spoken about like a fine wine, has simply been replaced by the new madness of objectivism and the pursuit of “better” numbers.
Either the ability to play back files that have no good reason to exist, or to produce a SNR that is 10 or 20 db better than its predecessor, which is already beyond the ability of human hearing. Or to be able to power headphones to such a level that they could be used as speakers. Why? Why are we chasing these pointless numbers.
And I know some of you are shouting at your screens, “its to show good engineering stupid”, I know that. I appreciate the value in showing that the $10,000 DAC is objectively worse than the $1000 DAC. That’s grand, but things are going too far, there’s a point where its just a game, and most likely it is a game that is being hacked. What design choices are being made by Topping et al just to get good numbers, without considering long term stability, energy consumption, safe design etc etc.
I appreciate that Amir states in his reviews that he is only recommending products based on the numbers and can’t speak for long term reliability etc. Though I don’t think its enough, somewhere on the front page of ASR should be a “Read this first” explaining that chasing numbers if entirely pointless beyond certain thresholds. To be fair there are several posts covering all these topics, they just take a bit of digging to find.
So where did I end up. I’ve sold all my Topping gear, returned to using my M-DAC and bought an RME ADI-FS 2. It has slightly worse SNR to the Topping products but has all the same great functionality of the M-DAC plus a whole lot more. The crazy thing is that it was even cheaper than the Topping stack.
Close the end of last year we had a child and my wife started eyeing my hard black angular Adam's with a certain look, after some time she informed me that they would be relegated to a dark corner of our home away from public gaze. The thing that was needed were some more home friendly speakers that had grills to keep prying fingers away from them. Thus the rekindling of the sickness began, the search for new HiFi equipment. As part of this search I stumbled across ASR and what began as a quest for some child friendly speakers turned into a full blown case of audiophile nervosa which demanded the full treatment, a completely new system.
Since my last bout of this illness there were now a lot more numbers. Everything was being measured. I read Toole’s book, I joined ASR and I started digging through the many threads to find the perfect setup. The DAC, amp and speakers to complete the system that would be the one true system, both child friendly and bring me closer to audio nirvana.
The Amp was pretty straight forward, a DIY Purifi Eval-1 kit. There was very little debate on this, both the objectivist and subjectivist were on the same page. Transparent amplification, ran cold and produced significant output. Measured well, sounded great. It has no buttons, no interface but its a power amp, it doesn’t need any of that.
Speakers, Revels. No questions asked. After reading Toole’s book I was already predisposed to liking them. I found a pair for a great price and couldn’t ask for more. Measured well, sounded great, again it is a passive component, it does what it is supposed to.
Before completing my perfect system I also purchased some Dan Clark headphones, measured great, sound amazing, do exactly what you expect.
DAC. The chart topping company with several products in the top ten was, you guessed it, Topping. Never heard of them before, and I was skeptical at first. But after reading through countless posts on a several threads on their top end DACs I won myself over. Surely, all these people praising these products couldn’t be wrong. They even had panthers on them playing golf, that’s got to count for something. I decided to go all out and get the best of the best, the Topping D90 MQA, using the latest and greatest chip on the market. The second best DAC ever reviewed according to the numbers at the time and still in the top five compared to the latest reviews. There were also some from Gustard and SMSL which looked promising but Topping had the longest track record of producing well regarded products so it seemed like the safe bet. In addition to the numbers on ASR there were plenty of more objectivist reviews using lots of random words praising this DAC.
As there were a few weeks lag between ordering and actually receiving the DAC in the interim period I ordered a second Topping DAC, the D70s as I decided that in addition to having a new family friendly system I would also replace my ageing M-DAC. Considering the design is almost nine years old and its limited to 24/96khz over USB it just had to be inferior to a new topping DAC and thus based on the numbers had to go.
The D90 arrived and what can I say, it sounded great. It produced beautiful music. Around this time I decided if I was going to replace my M-DAC, which has a built in headphone amp I also needed a dedicated headphone amp to use my lovely Dan Clark’s with, so I ordered an A90.
The A90 / a dedicated headphone amp was never a product class I had a need for before. It was only purchased to fill a gap in the D90 and allow for headphone listening. On paper it is in the top five headphone amps measured and can output deafening levels with almost any headphone.
Back to the D90. It sounds great but that’s where the pro’s end. Yes, the DAC sounds great, but it is inferior in every other way to my M-DAC which was designed nine years ago and honestly I couldn’t even say that’s a real pro as I’d be hard pressed to tell them apart. Its not a passive component, its something you interact with and it was bad at this.
M-DAC
Pros
- Produces beautiful music over speakers / headphones
- Program default input to start on or start on last used
- Has a display with a volume meter so you actually know if a signal is being sent to the DAC and you forget to turn the speakers/amps on.
- Automatically switches volume when plugging in headphones to last used level and back again
- Has zero pop/click when turning on and off, plugged into powered monitors / AMP.
- Volume control works over USB, full two way volume when used with Roon / Computer
- Has a great remote with buttons that all do something useful.
- Bit perfect test
- Balance correction
- Has a decent headphone amplifier.
- Lots of other features.
- Limited to 24/96khz over USB
- Limited to 24/192khz over SPDIF
- No DSD.
D90/D70s
PROS
- Produces beautiful music
- Can play 32/768khz PCM and DSD512 over USB
- Poor UX from top to bottom
- Remote is silly, several buttons do nothing, have to be very particular when pointing it
- Pops when turning on / off
- Hardly any programmable features, can’t set default input, can’t rename inputs
- Doesn’t do volume control over USB, not even one way.
- No headphone out, requires separate unit
A90
PROS
- Produces beautiful music
- Gets stupidly loud
- Doesn’t adjust volume when switching between speakers / headphones
- Draws 2.5W of electricity even when mechanical switch on the front is set to off?
Both the Topping and my old M-DAC produce beautiful music, but the Topping can play back some seriously hi-res files so I must be able to get more out of it. Thats it though, in every other regard the Topping products which were amazing on paper, in real life felt inferior to a nine year old product. Nine years is a long time in the current technology landscape.
It wasn’t long before I spent more time on ASR and worked out that DSD was a waste of time, so that’s one plus taken away from the Topping. And a little while later, reading more about sampling theorem that I came to the bitter realisation that 16/44khz is genuinely enough for music playback, if you really want to stretch it, then heck, make it 24/96khz. Funny, that’s what my old M-DAC was capable of doing over USB, that’s another plus taken away from the Topping. Leaving it with a grand total of zero advantages and a whole bunch of negatives.
What happened? How is it possible that the highest regarded products on ASR could be so disappointing. Let me be absolutely clear, they don’t sound disappointing, they sound great, but so does my old DAC.
The madness of subjectivism, where audio hardware was spoken about like a fine wine, has simply been replaced by the new madness of objectivism and the pursuit of “better” numbers.
Either the ability to play back files that have no good reason to exist, or to produce a SNR that is 10 or 20 db better than its predecessor, which is already beyond the ability of human hearing. Or to be able to power headphones to such a level that they could be used as speakers. Why? Why are we chasing these pointless numbers.
And I know some of you are shouting at your screens, “its to show good engineering stupid”, I know that. I appreciate the value in showing that the $10,000 DAC is objectively worse than the $1000 DAC. That’s grand, but things are going too far, there’s a point where its just a game, and most likely it is a game that is being hacked. What design choices are being made by Topping et al just to get good numbers, without considering long term stability, energy consumption, safe design etc etc.
I appreciate that Amir states in his reviews that he is only recommending products based on the numbers and can’t speak for long term reliability etc. Though I don’t think its enough, somewhere on the front page of ASR should be a “Read this first” explaining that chasing numbers if entirely pointless beyond certain thresholds. To be fair there are several posts covering all these topics, they just take a bit of digging to find.
So where did I end up. I’ve sold all my Topping gear, returned to using my M-DAC and bought an RME ADI-FS 2. It has slightly worse SNR to the Topping products but has all the same great functionality of the M-DAC plus a whole lot more. The crazy thing is that it was even cheaper than the Topping stack.
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