Recent content by jkorten

I own this piece of Schiit. Nice preamp. Extended range. For my headphones, best HP amp I've had. But a similar priced preamp from China (FM255 MKII clone from Weileing) sounds less stressful somehow. That being said, I'm keeping the Kara for my family summer home. But my main listening chair is...

You need something like this: https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256804400891355.html?spm=a2g0o.order_list.order_list_main.4.2e2518028ikRJS&gatewayAdapt=glo2usa Notice the insulators that will keep each connector separated from the case (if you drill the right diameter hole).

Not when the difference is that obvious. The TPA is transparent, the Topping is not. It's plain to hear. No blind testing is needed. Try them both and see what I'm talking about.

The output from the amp is differential. Each voltage swings about the halfway point of your power supply. It looks like you may have grounded your speaker terminal on the box. The outputs have to be completely isolated from anything.

@daniboun - by the way I bought the Topping, and built two monoblocks from Sylph and two monoblocks from 3E audio (TPA3255) and both of the TPA3255 versions sound way better than the Topping. The distortion measurements do not measure transparency and tonal quality well. Only listening can...

Not a fan of external power supplies. I'd solder in a connection if I ever bought one. The other problem is they're using NE5532 op amps which were the best on the market in 1980. But it is 45 years later. Those are rather bright sounding by today's standards. What's up with that? External...

I bought the predecessor to this model from China and it promptly failed after 3 months. The cost to send it back for service was almost equal to the cost of the DAC. So I strongly encourage everyone to purchase this from a within country dealer who provides warranty service.

I am in the medical device industry. There is a company famous for suing its customers to enforce rarely read supplier contracts and as well sues other companies and earns most of it's money that way. They purchased a very famous speaker company thinking they'd get into home patient monitoring...

I've bought quite a bit of stuff from aliexpress with no issues. Larger items take a while to ship (2 weeks) smaller take less. My 3Es have not failed yet.

I merely mean't what it sounds like. Like there's a sheet of plastic in front of me when I'm listening that makes things sound "reproduced" and less natural. Apologies for not being more explicit.

Search Preamp DIY kit on amazon - many tube and solid state options (NE5532 for instance, a very old but standard high end op amp that is a bit hard sounding compared to the latest from burr brown). I'm not a fan and prefer a separate preamp. But - try the potentiometer first! That's your...

Not recommended. You'd have to put a potentiometer in series with the signal which would significantly increase the source impedance to the amp causing a degradation in the signal distortion and noise. You need a preamp in front of this. The only way to use the op amps is if they have...

For my amps I bought silver coated multi conductor copper wire and crimped the JST connectors on and soldered the other ends onto the XLR connector. You can buy the JST and the wire at Digikey. But you do have to have a rather expensive crimping tool. Sometimes you can find them on ebay.

I've recently completed a build of the 3E audio and the Sylph audio version of the TPA3255 mono amp. I have to say I prefer the heatsink on the 3E audio. But can anybody explain why the op amps on the Sylph audio version get so hot? Are they biasing them in class A or something? Need to break in...

Do not connect this to your tpa. You want a unipolar power supply 48V for instance. Ground goes to the "-" sign and 48V goes to the "+" connector. The speaker outputs should have no connection to ground (they are differential with respect to each other and are both somewhere between 0 and 48V -...