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Topping D90SE Digital-to-Analog Converter Review

Topping D90SE

There was a time in the past when “Made in Japan” was not a desirable origin in an audio component. Nowadays, Japanese audio firms are responsible for some of the highest-quality audio gear available anywhere. Twenty-five years ago, Chinese-made audio gear was sneered at in the same way, but then we began to see components assembled in China for multinational audio firms. Nowadays, I find Chinese parts and sub-assemblies in products made everywhere. Even some loudspeakers with five- and six-figure price-tags use Chinese-made cabinets. The latest step in this evolutionary process would be Chinese manufacturers creating worldwide distribution under their own trademarks. That time has come.

I have, during the past year, listened to many Chinese entry- and mid-level components. Even the least expensive ones I’ve evaluated perform at a level, both sonically and ergonomically, that entry-level components in the past never achieved. Companies including SMSL, Gustard, Fiio, Singxer, Yulong, Matrix, and Topping have all produced high-performance components with outstanding measured specifications. Here in the U.S. we are seeing more of these products available via direct shipping from China, through online firms such as Apos Audio and China-HiFi-Audio. The problem is that most gear from Chinese manufacturers must be purchased “blind,” without the chance to hear or see the component in person. And while you can always try and return, for many this is still far less than ideal. Return shipping to China isn’t cheap. Also, there is the issue of warranty and/or repairs for Chinese-sourced gear here in the U.S. 

Although there are laws on the books legislating for “Right to Repair,” the plain fact is that modern integrated circuits, regardless of where they originate, are harder to repair than discrete components, and this is a universal issue, not one particular company’s or country’s problem. But in the case of foreign Internet-sourced components the situation is exacerbated, because you essentially have no warranty…so if gambling isn’t part of your nature, most Chinese manufacturers are probably in your no-fly zone.

Topping has emerged as one of China’s most technically advanced and internationally competitive audio firms. Currently, it offers eleven different digital audio converters (DACs), seven headphone amplifiers, and two power amplifiers. We will look at Topping’s most expensive DAC, the D90ES ($899), which has some of the best digital-performance specifications of any DAC, regardless of price or technology. Tally Ho!

Tech Tour

The D90SE would not exist save for the fact that Topping’s previous flagship, the D90MQA, used a top-of-the-line AKM DAC chip. AKM had a catastrophic fire in its factory, which curtailed all its DAC chip production. Topping had no choice but to redesign its DACs to use ESS chips. Why didn’t Topping use ESS chips before? The answer is because of “the ESS hump,” which was a rise in distortion figures in the ESS DAC chip’s midband performance compared to the AKM chip. But if you look at the entire overall distortion level graphs of both DAC chips, the top-of-the-line ESS chip actually performed slightly better than the top-of-the-line AKM chip, except for that hump. What to do? The obvious solution was to reduce this distortion in the midband, which is exactly what you see when you look at the D90SE’s current specifications.

If you want to look at all the D90SE’s specifications, Topping has made that extraordinarily easy by publishing the figures generated by testing the D90SE with its in-house Audio Precision APx555B. You can see all the numbers, graphs, and technical highlights of the D90SE laid out in detail. Yes, the specifications are very good. Independent third-party tests with a similar Audio Precision test suite yielded similar numbers. So, either Topping has discovered a way to “game” the APX555B for better numbers or the specifications are accurate.

One of the primary reasons the D90SE performs so well in testing is because Topping has a different way of harnessing the ESS9038PRO chip. Each of its eight channels is paired with another, making four channels of balanced output. According to Topping, this scheme is what improves the D90SE’s DAC performance.

Ergonomics

The D90SE was smaller than I expected from looking at photos. It only measures 8.79 by 6.3 by 1.77 inches, and weighs less than five pounds. Including a dollar bill in one of the pictures would have made its size more obvious. On the front panel you’ll find a centrally located display flanked on the left by a single input-selection button, and on the right by a pair of volume buttons to adjust levels up and down. That’s it. All other controls are accessible though the D90SE’s remote control. 

The remote control that comes with the D90SE is used by Topping for many of its components. It allows you to change digital filters on-the-fly without going into sub-menus. It also has all the standard features such as volume level, mute, power on/off, input selection, and display-brightness levels. Because it is used on multiple devices, the RC-15A remote also has several buttons that do nothing at all, but they’re still fun to push.

In addition to wired inputs for SPDIF coaxial and TosLink, USB, HDMI, IIS, and AES/EBU, the D90SE has a Bluetooth input that supports all aptX formats as well as Sony’s LDAC format. The wired inputs support DSD in either native or DOP formats (to DSD256), MQA (except IIS), and 768kHz/32 PCM (except TosLink, which maxes out at 192/24). Some manufacturers, including Topping, have taken to calling the I2S interface “IIS,” which can be transmitted over HDMI. 

The D90SE gives you both balanced XLR and single-ended RCA analog outputs, which you can use individually or in tandem. You also have the option of two different maximum output levels. You can have either 5V balanced and 2.5V unbalanced, or 4V balanced and 2V unbalanced. The reason for this option is that some preamps or active speakers will perform better when fed with slightly higher output, while other could sound worse due to front-end clipping from the higher output. Thus, the D90SE delivers two options.

The D90SE’s display is nothing special. Monochrome, kind of funky typeface, but the essentials are there—output level, bit rate, PCM, DSD, MQA flag, and the input and output chain. I’ve seen worse displays, such as the Gustard X-16, whose tiny typeface appears to be maybe 6-point. But the Topping looks downright shabby compared to the SMSL SU-9 DAC’s slick, color display.

Setup

Installing the D90SE was essentially plug and play with my MacPro desktop. The USB connection was instantly recognized via the Midi Control panel. Roon also identified and allowed me to enable the D90SE via the Roon settings page. I designated it as a renderer, so that Roon would do the first MQA unfold. Depending on the preamplifier or amplifier the D90SE was connected to, I used either the single-ended RCA or the balanced XLR outputs. When I had a balanced connection, I routed the single-ended feed to a headphone amp. When the primary feed was single-ended, I sent the balanced feed to a headphone amplifier. When I used the D90SE connected directly to an amplifier, I routed the unused feed to my subwoofer.

After using the D90SE for over a month in various setups, I experienced only one operational glitch. When the D90SE was grouped via Roon’s grouping feature with a Gustard X-16, the D90SE would emit an occasional low-level “burp.” While not at a level that was more than mildly distracting, something about this combination upset the signal chain periodically. Needless to say, after doing matched level A/Bs with these two DACs grouped, I did not employ that configuration again.

You can, if you try, set up the D90SE so that it will sound bad. The culprits are the 5-volt XLR/2.5-volt RCA outputs. With some preamplifiers or headphone amplifiers, this higher output setting will be too much and overload the inputs, resulting in distortion. Changing the D90SE’s output to 4-volt XLR/2-volt RCA will usually solve the problem. The default setting is the higher one, which has slightly better specs, and as the late Jerry Garcia sagely noted, “Louder is always better.” Changing the output levels requires going into the set-up menu and scrolling down to the last option on the page.

Sound

This is the section where I’m sure a number of readers are hoping that I discover that the D90SE, despite its wonderous specifications, sounds just OK. Sorry, but that was not the case. What I heard was reference-level digital reproduction without any sonic bromides. If the absence of coloration, individualistic character, or “house sound” was the goal, the D90SE has clearly achieved it. During my listening time with the D90SE I was never able to identify anything I would characterize as deviations from tonal neutrality. To my ears, the D90SE is very much in the “straight no chaser” school of DACs, like Benchmark or Bryston. If you need a more euphonic sonic output, the D90SE will not help you get to that place.

Since I have quite a number of recordings that I made of live performances of classical orchestras, chamber groups, Bluegrass ensembles, and solo recitals, I have a complete set of listening tools that I know well. Also, I know what the recording chain was, and what the various sonic “tells” are on different recordings. Throughout my listening sessions using my own material, I was continually encouraged to hear that the D90SE neither added nor subtracted from the spatial, textural, or rhythmic character of the performances. One of the unique recordings I have is one that I made at the Rockygrass Academy several years ago of Chris Thile playing and commenting on my then recently acquired 1930 Gibson F-5 mandolin. The D90SE did a superlative job of retaining all the harmonic characteristics of both Chris’ voice and my mandolin. [Steven is a noted expert on guitars and mandolins, and is a long-time contributor to Vintage Guitar magazine. —RH] 

As usual when I listen, I’m primarily listening for faults rather than for whether a particular recording sounds more real on one piece of gear than another. But one performance arena where the D90SE ranks as “jaw-dropping” is its silence. In a properly configured system with no additive noise such as low-level hums or buzzes, listening through the D90SE will deliver the “blackest blacks” (if you wish to define signal-to-noise in terms of colors) you will hear from any DAC. In a system where I can place my ear within an inch of my loudspeaker’s drivers, I heard nothing, not even a hiss; when I switched from the D90SE as an input source to a shorted input source, there was absolutely no difference in base noise levels. On many commercial recordings the difference between the absolute silence of the D90SE and the base-level “silence” of the recording was noticeable, always in favor of the D90SE. If your sonic goal is to cobble together the quietest, most noise-free system possible, the D90SE ranks as a first-call player.

Competition

There are audiophiles who swear that they can tell which DAC chip is being employed in a DAC by the sound. I will readily admit that I can’t do that. But one thing I can identify is the sound from the analog circuits employed after a DAC’s digital sections. There is a big difference between the sound of an op-amp, a tube design, and a solid-state discrete-component output section.

Also, during my recent experiences, telling the difference between two digital components that utilize similar op-amp-based analog output schemes can be daunting. I know that because that is what I did.

I used my reference nearfield system for a series of semi-blind A/B comparisons (I say semi-blind because, although I did not know which DAC feed was which during listening, there was no additional human to do the switching.) The signal chain consisted of either the Topping D90SE or the $499 Gustard X-16 DACs, both connected via the same USB pipe to my MacPro desktop running Roon. The two DACs were “ganged” together via Roon’s ganging feature, which sends the same signal to more than one endpoint, while preserving the settings for each endpoint. The two DACs’ single-ended analog outputs were connected to a Tortuga LDR300X passive preamplifier, which was connected to the LSA Warp 1 power amplifier driving NSMT Model 15 or Omega Audio Prototype monitors. A Velodyne DD10+ subwoofer was also connected via the Tortuga preamplifier’s second output. Input selection was done via the Tortuga’s Apple remote. And yes, the display was not visible from the listening position, which was part of the blind aspect of the session.

I used a variety of sources for my A/B comparisons, including my own live concert recordings made in DSD128, as well as commercial releases via both Tidal and Qobuz and selections from my hard drive-based library. Upon initial setup I found the Topping D90SE had a higher output level than the Gustard, which required reducing its level 2.5dB to match the Gustard’s. One of the nice features of the Tortuga preamplifier is that I can set the initial volume levels, so when I switched input sources the Tortuga’s volume settings remained the same. Unlike many preamplifiers which either pause or produce a slight pop or sound when switching sources, the Tortuga was silent—so silent that during the tests I often had to check to see if the input source had indeed changed, because I could detect no change in the sound!

After multiple listening sessions I was forced to conclude that I could not tell any sonic difference between the sound of the Topping D90SE and the Gustard X-16. Both offer a clear view of the musical event without any house-sound or euphonic colorations. Both produced the same imaging characteristics in terms of depth, width, image focus, and dynamic acuity. Hard as I tried, I could not discern any sonic differences I could regularly identify.

The Gustard X-16 and Topping D90SE have extremely similar feature sets, and even their specifications aren’t more than a dB or two different in signal to noise. If you are on a tight budget, you could opt for the $400-cheaper Gustard, and to my ears you would not be giving up anything sonically.

Summary

Back in the early days of high-end audio, when solid-state devices began to supersede tube-based electronics, many solid-state components generated far better specifications than comparable tube-based electronics. While the specifications were better, with most the sound was worse. Why? Because on most of the early solid-state components these figures were generated in large part by increasing the feedback-based distortion-reduction circuits, both global and local. This “specifications war” made some seasoned audiophiles leerier of components that boast specifications that set new performance benchmarks. Fool me once…

The D90SE is a Johnny-come-lately specifications champion from a Chinese manufacturer with a limited track record with audiophiles here in the United States. So, for some of a certain age, this smacks of déjà vu. To them I can only say that after all my listening, I found the D90SE to be exactly what it purports to be—a well-designed digital-to-analog converter that performs on a par with reference DACs I have used in the past.

My mentor, J. Gordon Holt, cautioned me to never, ever, enthuse too much in a review. The reviews he rued were the ones where he went gaga, such as when he wrote up Sony’s first CD player. With his wise advice reverberating in my consciousness, I will admit that when considering the Topping D90SE it’s hard not to scream: “ENDGAME DAC!” And begin jumping around a la Tom Cruise in Risky Business. But since I am, first and foremost a fully grown old gent, I won’t give in to this vile temptation. But I will go on the record that if a neutral, high-resolution, modern, well-configured DAC that sounds as true to source material as any I’ve ever heard is something you are seeking, the D90SE could easily qualify as your new reference DAC.

Specs & Pricing

DAC: ESS chip
Inputs: USB, Bluetooth, AES/EBU, SPDIF, TosLink, I2S on HDMI
Formats supported: PCM to 768/32, DSD1024, MQA, LDAC, FLAC, AIFF, MP3
Output: Balanced, unbalanced, or both with either fixed or variable outputs
Dimensions: 8.79″ x 6.3″ x 1.77″
Weight: 4.83 lbs.
Price: $899 

Apos Inc. (U.S. Distributor)
1400 Coleman Ave., #E23
Santa Clara, CA 95050
(510) 858-6585
aposaudio.com 

Tags: DAC DIGITAL TOPPING

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