Topping D90LE Full Balanced HiFi DAC Bluetooth 5.0 LDAC DSD512 PCM768kHz Preamplifier ES9038PRO Audio Decoder for Music Enjoyment Silver

Product Information

EDIT: Ended up having an issue with optical and coax to this DAC from my LG OLED TV. On ASR I received a response that if the source has poor jitter it may not work with the DAC. Other users reported similar issues with their LG OLED TVs and another user with his Samsung TV. Unsure if other TVs or sources will have the issue as well, but it became such a problem that I had to return this DAC. After all most of my listening is done with my speaker setup nowadays. Compatibility with my TV’s optical or coax is a requirement. Currently using my SMSL SU-9 and will review it soon. Attachments

You have a choice of 7 filters and I was happy to see thee of them producing the correct filtering for 44.1 kHz sampling: Maybe it would be better in a bigger room than mine. That’s a consideration. Or with tubes somewhere in the mix. It was a little unexpected comparing the D90 and D90SE and realizing that the newest unit sounds exactly as decompressed and ethereal as its precursor, which mind you was excellent in this department. D90 was already quite impressive in terms of scale, as it sounded as one of the widest AKM based DACs I had the pleasure of listening, yet the Sabre equipped sibling sounded equally impressive. I tested it in a high-end loudspeaker setup and also in a headphone setup. When I used it in the living room, I’ve tried it as a DAC + Pre unit and then only as a DAC, leaving the preamp duties to the Topping PRE90 or Benchmark HPA4. I’ve used a Keces S300 power amplifier, that was driving a pair of KEF Reference 3.

The SNR and dynamic range from the D90 implementation won’t get you those numbers, no system DAC rarely gets that high. However, the D90 does benefit from that enhanced performance spec on paper. The Topping logo is printed in white in the top left corner of the front face. “D90SE” is printed in the bottom left corner, and the MQA logo is featured in the top right corner. On the left side of the device’s front face is a small square power / select button, which cycles through inputs by default. On the right side of the front face are similarly shaped and sized plus and minus volume controls. For the first time ever in Topping history, they used eight (8!) OPA 1612A for the I/V conversion stage, meaning that all 8-channels of this DAC chip are being used. Meaning that D90SE performs an independent I/V conversion for all 8 channels and then connects them in parallel, squeezing the best this silicon is capable of. This is clever engineering that added a lot to the cost. As for the OPA1612 themselves, those are regarded as warm, smooth and natural sounding, exactly what a super-linear silicon like ES9038 PRO really needs. Another two OPA1612 with plenty of resistors around them are being used as VREF, offering an accurate temperature-compensated voltage value and a maximum current to the load. D90SE looks overkill, but in a good way, since they drained the last drop of performance from that ESS Sabre chip. Around those op-amps and the DAC chip itself, hundreds of high-precision (0.1%) resistors can be spotted.

DACs: Schiit Yggdrasil+ More Is Better, Schiit Bifrost 2 OG, Chord Mojo, FiiO BTR5, Apple Lightning Dongle, AK SP2000, iPod Touch 7th gen I²S simplifies connections between two I²S compliant devices by merely requiring an HDMI connector. For example, Cayin’s N6ii DAP has an I²S output which you can connect to the D90 input. The same is also for Cayin’s iDAP-6 streamer so technically these two units are quite compatible. Yes. There has been tremendous progress in the last 5 years in DAC performance, and class D amps too where now even very modestly priced items are good enough that claims about audible performance differences are to be treated with suspicion. You can feed the signal input to the Topping D90LE using high-resolution Bluetooth wireless connectivity. With the help of the latest CSR8675 Bluetooth chipset from Qualcomm, D90LE supports high-resolution LDAC wireless transmission codecs. A Hub Of Digital Inputs:-We take the digital input down another 10 dB to -110 dBFS which drops the level by another 0.31. Again the screen was magnified by 3 to make the wave look the same size as the two that preceded it. The noise of the Topping D90SE is making the sine wave harder to see but is still visible above its noise floor. The amplitude of the sine wave is at 12.4 uVRMS. The signal-to-noise ratio is now 17 dB relative to the -110 dBFS signal. With an SNR of only 17 dB, the waveform is not surprisingly noisy but keep in mind the signal is microscopic at this level. Full scale is 4VRMS. This signal is 0.0000034 of full scale. Any DAC will need to make some sort of sense of this, of course. It’s quite a challenge. SINGLE-ENDED There was a time when DX3 Pro was the benchmark. See how much the D90SE beats it by. It is almost left in the dust!

Connect all of your devices to the D90SE/LE via its six input interfaces: AES, Bluetooth, USB, Optical, Coax, and IIS. Stream Spotify or Apple Music from your phone using Bluetooth. Connect your computer or laptop via USB or IIS. Get more out of movie night by connecting your TV via IIS or optical. Fully-functional remoteWhen I first heard of Topping, the very last thing I thought I’d end up seeing is their partnership with a UK distributor and yet, here we are

Sending music from my smartphone that was connected to streaming services as Qobuz and Tidal worked as a charm and LDAC codec sounded almost undistinguishable to its wired connections. Bottom line is that D90SE worked well with all Bluetooth senders, but it performed better with those that support BT 5.0 and LDAC codecs. For the price point, it seems there are a lot of good things stuffed under the hood of the D90. For a start, the DAC inside is the flagship AKM AK4499 which is AKM’s first current-output DAC and their flagship chipset at the time of writing. A broad equivalent of this from ES would be the ES9038PRO in terms of product positioning. The very last release of REW, v5.20.9, even allows to display the frequency range taken into account for the fundamental. That's genious !)This is especially true for Frequency response measurements, where some specific signal may be used if that's the case. The Audio Precision analyzer puts severe strain on getting such high numbers due to its own self-noise so I was surprised to see 123 dB limit broken. Distortion is down to an incredibly low -140 dB! In the headphone setup, it was mostly connected to a Benchmark HPA4, driving several high-end planar-magnetic headphones and a bunch of dynamic headphones. Okay folks, enough with the talk, my ears are itching for some music, so let’s hit some ear-drums! As with the previous figure, if you look at the top of the oscilloscope figure you will see the amplitude in dB off by -20dB, the amplitude in volts, and the SNR relative to -90 dB. If a noise-free sine wave was applied to the right channel we would see the self-noise riding on the wave. If you can afford it, the RME, especially with the APU when required, remains the top choice for measurerments, IMO.