Topping A90 or Topping Part Deux

I think it'll pass, i hear some counter noises on other forums i frequent.
Otherwise karma might have her say...

 

LOL I was trying to get you one in your hands to play with, but I thought you weren't interested. (L30) I grabbed a used one that was in SoCal - I was going to have him ship it up to you first, but now its somewhere between SoCal and Arizona.

I'm literally only hoping it works with the Andromeda / Andromeda Gold. I just want a wall powered balanced armature amplifier. I actually DO want something that sounds similar to the HPA-4 from benchmark. I like dipping my toes into that sound once in a while with balanced armatures. My SFD-1 -> Krell Klone requires the IEMatch and is a little on the more mellow side of presentation (which is my preference, but like I said - its nice to have options if you know you actually want to experience something specific)

 

I would have, but the gain is too high for Andromeda without IEMatch. I mentally don't like using that thing as a band-aid. Same with Asgaard 3. The HPA-4's volume control would be ideal, but I'm not dropping that kind of coin to make my Andromeda's sound clinical.

EDIT: P.S. I don't believe DAP's or battery powered setups produce what the full-size setup can, but that is just my own personal experience. I'm not out there trying all these overpriced DAP's just to be let down by crap UI.

 

Really? I'm pretty darn happy w/ Asgard on low gain to Andro, pot between 8:30 and 10:00 depending on music. I've never thought of myself as a "loud" music listener, either. Not trying to be argumentative, though. Actually, with every headphone I've got, IEM or dynamic over ear I prefer Asgard3 in low gain. It gets fuzzy in the bass on high gain.

This is about the limit of tolerable for 4 or 5 songs for me on the speaker rig, "blasting" Hum Inlet 'cause it's Friday night:

 

The more I read this guy's posts the more I get the feeling this is a really young/immature person. But yeah that's no excuse, especially on the post deleting part. I did notice ASR flagging him as a manufacturer/company representative now though LOL, do they keep an eye on SBAF ???

 

I saw that! Guess some people complained about it. Glad they did that finally.

I think he is relatively young as he was supposedly a intern at topping. Why they had a intern designing their flagship products is beyond me though. I assume so they wouldn't have to pay him much or because whoever was designing their early amps was quite poor at it (A30....was ahem not great ) Might be why he is so snippy on the forums, he may not getting that much credit or money for his work.

 

Just received the L30 and I can at least say at this very second... This thing cost the same as the Go-Vibe portable amplifier that I believe was one of my first "proper" amplifiers. Well.. for the same price - this thing blows that and all my portables away for sheer power and control. Currently hooked up to a gamma2 so I can't comment on finesse and scaling yet. Its just very matter of fact sound/presentation right now - a little more forward than my normal preference. I'll update when I have better equipment to play around with.

 

I met Amir in person a while back during the HD DVD / Blu-ray format war, spent like a couple hours with him and some other folks at an event.

He is is a good guy, good personality, but also typical big dork w/ a big dorky ego.

He got internet famous on AVSFORUM that period, he worked for Microsoft in their HD DVD division [VP of Digital Media division] and promoted HD DVD over Blu-ray. In fact, one could say Amir was "the face of HD DVD." Worked very closely with Toshiba as well. He actually was a good source for technical information and made a lot of logical arguments at the time favoring HD DVD of course. These logical arguments ignored the fact that Blu-ray had better specs than HD DVD, so it was kind of the same position he is playing at ASR. i.e. "HD DVD only has 30gb, but it uses more efficient VC-1 codec so Blu-ray with 50gb using inefficient MPEG2 is just a waste of space, and therefore Blu-ray is no better." Of course, when you used H264 with 50gb on Blu-ray it was better, but that part of the argument was omitted.

When HD DVD closed up shop, so did his internet famous... UNTIL ASR.

I see ASR as a logical extension of his HD DVD "internet famous" persona at AVS. He likes to promote the little cheap guy and prove the big expensive guy is a waste. He found a gig with a very receptive audience at ASR. I personally find it destructive because it discourages personal experimentation with audio, which is the true way to get anywhere towards good sound. It's like the folks who back in the 90s would read a Pioneer receiver spec sheet "100wx5, must be 500w powerful amp!" and just bought it without realizing it sounded like a trash can compared to a better brand. Topping is like the same thing except worse as on top of getting an inferior product people are paying much more than its sonic worth - which ain't much.

ALL THAT BEING SAID

HD DVD actually had a major China link as well. China adopted as their official format CBHD which was HD DVD, basically, which Toshiba helped China create. Toshiba and Microsoft were the two biggest companies behind HD DVD. Toshiba created the HD DVD players, disc format, hardware; while HD DVD's software/media interactivity layer "HDi" for menus/extras/downloads/etc was created by Microsoft - and that was the division Amir spearheaded. So that's kind of interesting given the China link to the current gig as well. Blu-ray had more (almost all of) Japanese companies behind it; Toshiba was the only Japanese company behind HD DVD. More about China's version CBHD here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Blue_High-definition_Disc

 

The main draw of HD DVD was less DRM and no region coding. Which is also a big reason many studios didn't like it. HDi also was far less clunky than BD-J, with better dev tools. But in terms of pure A/V quality Blu-ray had it beat pretty soundly. They also were having a real hard time manufacturing HD DVD discs, tons of them were coming off the line with some weird film on them and people had to boil their HD DVD discs to get them to work (it was a thing).

 

haha the always on sale happy feet!

Literally the day warner pulled out I listed everything I had on ebay, stuff was still selling really high at that point

But I kept a few discs that were better than the blu-ray or not on blu-ray and transcoded them to BD-R

 

I beg to differ. ASR is why I have a D50. Direct result of surfing for measurements. I should mention that’s also how I found SBAF. Too bad I found ASR first

 

Early impressions with J.River -> Eitr -> SFD-1 -> L30 -> MoonDrop Blessing 2

It is more in line with the HPA-4 presentation. Good grip and control. The SFD-1 adds just enough of its magic to soften it up a little bit. I personally would have liked the sound of the Pocket Class A from XRK971, but the wall powered nature and way better volume control has me OK with the sacrifice.

This will not be used for any of my full-size headphones except possibly the LCD-i4 which I treat like a full-size.

Very simple and effective amplifier with a good price. Worth checking out for the IEM only crowd. I'm going to test balanced armature only IEM's tonight hopefully. The L30 controls the dynamic driver in the Blessing 2 very well. Nice texture / delineation - no over/under-shooting the attack/decay if that makes sense.

 

OK, pulled out "my" favorite version of the Andromeda, the SE: Gold. They are something absurd like 7ohm and 116db sensitivity. I unfortunately have not heard the 'S', 'MW10', or '2020' - so the Gold is my 'Standard Andromeda' that I preferred over the Ara just for the tonality and not the technical ability. The Gold is the "Fun" one... what's the point of not enjoying your music.

Anyways - the L30 with my SFD-1 and the Andromeda Gold, I can hear the noise floor of the DAC on -9 gain + max volume, 0 gain I believe I can hear the DAC noise floor much earlier and same thing goes for +9 gain. If I pull the DAC from the chain, I can hear the L30 noise floor at max volume in all gains, but it is very low in -9, 0 gain it is acceptable considering how much power there is, and +9 is hissy, but not too much of a concern.

So why am I running +9 gain with the Andromeda Gold right now? Because I can find all levels of listening that I'd ever do on the Andromeda Gold easily attainable at this gain and it seems to have the most control over the BA drivers at all volume levels. (no crossovers in the Gold)

The Gamma2 / SFD1 differences are discernible and welcome.

I always felt my KSA-5 Klone was overkill for Balanced Armatures - it would get them into dynamic compression way too quickly and it could be hissy if it was in a bad mood / alignment with the moon stars what have you.

I wish I could take some of the concepts of this amp and add some discrete pure class-a magic and add in a Schiit relay + remote control.

I guess I like the form factor, gain options, ultra-low self noise, price/performance ratio.

I'm not going to try the L30 with full-size headphones anytime soon and I'm not going to recommend it to SBAF unless you are a weirdo like me who wanted a dedicated (wall-powered) amplifier for these stupidly sensitive IEM's (it's a blessing and a curse that I appreciate enough to look for this type of amplifier)

If you have any questions - shoot.

 

I just received my Topping A90 yesterday, and I can say compared to my customized Class A PASS WHAMMY w dual Opa 627 (I choose that OPA after using a bunch of others- sounding the best to me), I think the Topping A90 is reference quality in sound. The switches all work flawlessly to control inputs and are solid construction without any noise when switching between XLR and RCA for example or using l,m,h gains- no noise between switching at all. Comparing the sound to the PASS well, the PASS seems to be boosting bass making it a bit warmer sounding initially - but I am still learning what the A90 has to offer sound wise- it is not boring or sterile, sound stage sounds more open and clear to the recording original- I plan on swapping some XLR cables (one of them is the GRIMM TPR XLR and the CapistranoCables all braided 16 core silver xlr I spec'd out and am using now). I haven't received the Grimm as of yet. I can report the A90 is very very black with zero noise or hiss or hum of any kind like my PASS WHAMMY, which is expected these days. I can say the Wyred4Sound Intimo is terrible comparing the amp to both of these, an inferior design altogether. I also noticed the A90 has some music bleed when volume is at zero - ever so slight but noticeable at high gain and medium gain when music is playing and volume is turned to zero through headphones like the Kennerton Gjallarhorn Sen HD600. I plan on doing some tests with my Etymotic ER4 s/p for noise- but haven't yet. I do like the fact the A90 has balanced XLR, balanced 4.4, SE 6.3 TRS jacks and a toggle for inputs. I may be an island here- but I do think $499 is not a lot these days but comparing it to Erish it would seem high priced. I haven't tried the Geshelli, but that too seems like a deal for great sound. I will report back on my A90 as I do more listening. So far I can say I love this hobby and have since I was young enough to remember.

 

I've had an A90 for a week now and thought I'd post some impressions. Chain is Eitr>Modi Multibit>A90>HD6XX/Elegia/Ether CX

Build: I think the appeal of something like the A90 is not really its build quality and aesthetics. But I wanted to post some comments because I see a fair few people saying the build quality is great. IMO it’s not. It’s very average. The case is metal, but it’s the most plastic-y metal I’ve ever seen. It’s destroyed by Schiit amps.

The volume knob is pretty bad too. The A90 knob is only marginally better than the SP200 knob, if at all. The turn is loose and imprecise and it feels cheap. Again the Schiit knobs destroy it.

Sound quality: I personally find it much easier and more useful to discuss SQ relative to comparable amps, so...

A90 v SP200

I half expected this comparison to be very close. I really wanted something with pre-outs and so any SQ improvement was going to be a bonus. But the A90 is significantly better in every way. Better detail retrieval, imaging, sound stage, balance. Tonally they’re broadly similar, although the SP200 has a honky mid/upper bass bloat I hadn’t really noticed until putting it against the A90. The A90 is flatter, more neutral. I think the price difference is justified by the performance of the two.

A90 v Jotunheim

This is a tricky comparison because these two are polar opposites. The A90 is balanced, flat, airy and laid back. The Jot is dynamic, meaty, aggressive and intimate. This comparison has made me realise that the Jot is more mid forward, the A90 is pretty flat. In technical terms, I think the A90 is probably the better amp. It has better detail retrieval, separation, 3-D, sound stage and balance. But it is very slightly cold/clinical/digital sounding. The Jot has a beautiful rich and natural timbre to it that I prefer to the A90. The slight coldness of the A90 make it slightly less forgiving than the Jot and it can sound a touch splashy on some recordings. It suits the 6XX and Ether CX better than the Elegia. I do want to make it clear though that these negatives are very, very slight and they only really bother me when I’m coming immediately from the Jot. But I suspect those of you who don’t like the THX amps, won’t like this either. I would be really interested to see what some of the regulars here thought of the A90, I’m not sure whether the digital/coldness of the A90 is really very slight or if I’m less sensitive to it not having experience proper high end gear that doesn’t trade off timbre.

I’m keeping both the Jot and A90. My Jot has the MB card and I use it in the bedroom. If I could only keep one, I think it would be the A90. But there is a magic to the Jot I’d miss.

 

A little surprising (not really tbh) that the A90 ($500) features the crappy pot shown in the picture below compared to the Alps Blue Velvet pots included in $199 Schitt amps.