Topping DM7 8-Channel DAC Review

[Music1969]

What it achieves is being able to turn it up to 0dB on your volume and having it sound as clear as -20dB. However it'll be 90dB on a meter instead of 100dB because of the headroom management.

Hearing music at 90+db without distortion of any kind is a decent tradeoff for amplification power.

I am able to compensate for Audiolenses insertional loss in my convolver (adding equal gain to all channels).

To achieve the same thing you are saying.

Do this either in the convolver or the correction files themselves and you can swap out any hardware any time.

There is no need to do this on the DAC if you are someone swapping out DACs

I don't think the complaining dude knows how to do this

 

[Sokel]

I don't think the complaining dude knows how to do this

I'm one of the complaining ones,so...

To be fair it's not this thing by itself I'm complaining about,it does what it does and it's ok.
It's probably the expectations,the things we asked before the release.And of course the comparison with stuff like Okto,even if it's not fair with half the price (and I'm not talking about looks).

Building an active system is tricky and all the help is welcome,it's nice to have hardware controls,makes you feel somewhat safe.
And the fact of not having control of something so simple as individual volume control is not inspiring.
That's all.

 

[Jimster480]

Honestly looking at this, it is hard to understand who it is for. Since it only has USB input; it can only be used with things like computers (or maybe phones)? So what is supposed to drive this thing? I mean 8 channels is quite a bit but they seem to all be 6.35mm outputs instead of something like XLR or even RCA?

Why make things so complicated?

 

[dartinbout]

I only have the DX7 Pro and the A90 from Topping. Neither allows for channel volume changing. I don't remember any Topping that does, but I may be wrong.

I did write Topping Service.
"Dear Topping I believe that the chipset is capable of allowing individual channel volume alteration. Is there any plans to update the firmware to allow this fun?"

They wrote
Hi,

I will send your feedback to the R&D department.

Best Regards

--------------------

TOPPING SERVICE

"

 

[voodooless]

Why make things so complicated?

As opposed to what? TRS to XLR cables are there in abundance…

 

[Sokel]

I only have the DX7 Pro and the A90 from Topping. Neither allows for channel volume changing. I don't remember any Topping that does, but I may be wrong.

They use the same XMOS with Khadas if I remember well.
So it's easy,you go to the driver panel and you press the little thing in the picture.

Joint control

individual control

Edit:Just tested it with ASIO output in foobar and it works fine even with that.

 

[dualazmak]

So,,, therefore,,, in any way,,, "where to control master volume" and "where to control relative gains" are always one two of the critical issues in active multichannel multi-amplifier setup, also from safety point of view.

Even though I know many people use 5 - 12 VDC trigger function(s) of DAC(s) and amplifier(s) for simultaneous ignitions all together, IMHO, it should be avoided from safety point of view. And, at least your "master volume" should be off or minimal (minus infinity dB position) at the system ignition, and I myself believe all of the digital and analog SP gains should be also off or minimal at the ignition to protect our precious SP drivers from unexpected clipping and/or possible ignition pops.

From this perspective, active multichannel multi-amplifier setup would not be recommended for naive HiFi audio beginners, again IMHO.

Just for reference, at least I myself am always much careful in "shutdown sequences" and "ignition (startup) sequences" in my multichannel multi-amplifier setup, as I shared here.

 

[dartinbout]

They use the same XMOS with Khadas if I remember well.
So it's easy,you go to the driver panel and you press the little thing in the picture.

View attachment 220843

Joint control



View attachment 220844

individual control

Edit:Just tested it with ASIO output in foobar and it works fine even with that.

Uhhh, thank you for playing but you didn't make the final buzzer. As a lovely parting gift, left me quote the eminent philosopher, Mr. Breathed

Not all hardware and drivers work the same across implementations.

 

[Sokel]

Uhhh, thank you for playing but you didn't make the final buzzer. As a lovely parting gift, left me quote the eminent philosopher, Mr. Breathed

Not all hardware and drivers work the same across implementations.

Will try something else then?
Go to Windows sound properties,press to go to control panel (right up corner) find the device double click on it and go to levels,it will look like this.

Press balance just beside the little speaker and it may give you the control.

 

[JohnYang1997]

Honestly looking at this, it is hard to understand who it is for. Since it only has USB input; it can only be used with things like computers (or maybe phones)? So what is supposed to drive this thing? I mean 8 channels is quite a bit but they seem to all be 6.35mm outputs instead of something like XLR or even RCA?

Why make things so complicated?

The 6.35mm TRS jack is essentially the same as XLRs but saves space. It would require a much bigger case for 8 XLRs.

This is not exactly complicated either, many people have already made comparisons to Motu Ultralite mk5 which also has TRS balanced outputs.

But I can understand it not being very familiar to many people. The same question were asked when E50 and D10 balanced launched.

 

[Jimster480]

The 6.35mm TRS jack is essentially the same as XLRs but saves space. It would require a much bigger case for 8 XLRs.

This is not exactly complicated either, many people have already made comparisons to Motu Ultralite mk5 which also has TRS balanced outputs.

But I can understand it not being very familiar to many people. The same question were asked when E50 and D10 balanced launched.

I understand, yes the case definitely would have to be bigger. I was just mentioning since most things have XLR connections or straight speaker connections. There are a few things which do use 6.35mm TRS, sometimes instruments or stage equipment. My wife's Violin has a mic I bought for her that uses a 6.35mm TRS.

If I was going to use this with regular home audio speakers though I would need a ton of adapters (or well 8, one for each channel ) since I haven't seen any home gear with 6.35mm connections (at least into speakers or Amps).

 

[JohnYang1997]

I understand, yes the case definitely would have to be bigger. I was just mentioning since most things have XLR connections or straight speaker connections. There are a few things which do use 6.35mm TRS, sometimes instruments or stage equipment. My wife's Violin has a mic I bought for her that uses a 6.35mm TRS.

If I was going to use this with regular home audio speakers though I would need a ton of adapters (or well 8, one for each channel ) since I haven't seen any home gear with 6.35mm connections (at least into speakers or Amps).

There are cheap trs to xlr cables tho.

 

[AudioJester]

I use a PC to my okto8 with Roon and sometimes hqp. To avoid any disasters and bypassing the convolution filters/crossovers - those are the only 2 software that can access the okto. Windows output to the okto is disabled.

 

[Jimster480]

There are cheap trs to xlr cables tho.

Didn't know this was a thing. Will check into it. Considering I wanna build a home theatre soon.

 

[dualazmak]

I use a PC to my okto8 with Roon and sometimes hqp. To avoid any disasters and bypassing the convolution filters/crossovers - those are the only 2 software that can access the okto. Windows output to the okto is disabled.

Same here in my multichannel setup with PC and OKTO DAC8PRO. I have "historical" and "practical" reasons for sticking to "all in ASIO I/O" in my PC based multichannel audio system where "Windows output to the okto is disabled" , as I shared here. (Now my PC's OS is Windows 11 Pro, as shared here.)

I use EKIO as system-wide DSP (XO/EQ) center, and only EKIO feeds DSP-ed multichannel (8-Ch) into DAC8PRO through the dedicated 8-Ch DIYINHK ASIO driver.

 

[MCH]

There are cheap trs to xlr cables tho.

@JohnYang1997 at the beginning of this thread there were many people wondering if using the DM7 with unbalanced amps would somehow degrade performance. Seems there were precedents with other topping dacs (D10B). Any comments on that? What would be your advice, as many people will combine balanced and unbalanced (ie subs) amps with this?
See most posts from ca #440 onwards, specifically, for instance #465:

Topping DM7 8-Channel DAC Review

@WolfX-700's review is up on L7Audio: Measurements of Topping DM7 8Ch USBDAC (googley translated).

www.audiosciencereview.com

Thank you

 

[dualazmak]

@JohnYang1997 at the beginning of this thread there were many people wondering if using the DM7 with unbalanced amps would somehow degrade performance. Seems there were precedents with other topping dacs. Any comments on that? What would be your advice, as many people will combine balanced and unbalanced (ie subs) amps with this?
Thank you

@JohnYang1997,

Let me join with above @MarcosCh's inquiry on balanced-to-unbalanced issue. I assume you are already aware of this post (#577 on that thread) written by Pavel of OKTO Research on this issue in OKTO DAC8PRO. I would highly appreciate if you would give us your similar descriptions specific for your DM7.

Also I myself wrote here in this thread as;
>I would like to see inside photos in detail what and how are the grounding treatments including the possible TRS ground connection(s) to the chassis in Topping DM7.
Your info/descriptions on "grounding" treatments in DM7 as far as possible especially at the TRS portions, would be highly appreciated.

 

[mdsimon2]

I thought I was agreeing with you. I do.

I thought you were as well but then you responded to @Music1969's query below implying that there are differences between letting the DSP (AL) and DAC compensate for level differences, if I misunderstood your statement I apologize.

But if the DAC levels are already at max (example) in mixer, does it matter in practise whether you let AL compensate for this 6dB difference between drivers, or you manually adjust it in DACs ASIO/ALSA mixer panel? If it is already maxed in mixer, the only thing you can manually do is reduce levels in mixer?

But what has been achieved in the end in practical terms?

What it achieves is being able to turn it up to 0dB on your volume and having it sound as clear as -20dB. However it'll be 90dB on a meter instead of 100dB because of the headroom management.

Hearing music at 90+db without distortion of any kind is a decent tradeoff for amplification power.

I don't think using the DAC to attenuate level differences achieves anything different than attenuating in DSP other than making you slightly more susceptible to digital clipping and giving you slightly less granularity on attenuation (Ultralite Mk5 output channel trim is in 1 dB steps for example). As long as you are not digital clipping I expect the outputs of either approach to be identical and I am still looking for an example to the contrary.

Michael

 

[Sokel]

I don't think using the DAC to attenuate level differences achieves anything different than attenuating in DSP other than making you slightly more susceptible to digital clipping and giving you slightly less granularity on attenuation (Ultralite Mk5 output channel trim is in 1 dB steps for example). As long as you are not digital clipping I expect the outputs of either approach to be identical and I am still looking for an example to the contrary.

Michael

Newbie question:
Does it matter if the attenuation applies on digital or analog like Okto for example (if I'm not mistaken)?

Edit:No,I'm not:

 

[mdsimon2]

Newbie question:
Does it matter if the attenuation applies on digital or analog like Okto for example (if I'm not mistaken)?

Okto uses digital volume control. Ultralite Mk5 uses digital volume control. Topping DM7 uses digital volume control. And so on.

Running a DAC with no attenuation and using a downstream analog volume control potentially has a noise benefit over digital volume control (whether in DSP or DAC) as it will attenuate noise from the DAC at lower volume levels. However in practice such multichannel volume controls often have channel imbalance issues and typically have worse noise performance than the DAC alone, see the Volume8 as an example -> https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/spl-volume8-review.34870/.

A big benefit of these high dynamic range DACs is you can use digital volume control and not have any noise issues.

Michael