TOPPING Centaurus (collaborative product with HOLO AUDIO)

Don't forget Douk, Fosi, WiiM, AIYIMA, SMSL, you know, the Shenzhen clan. Makes me laugh when all the other brands get scolded when they have an external power brick, and for these it's happy golfing.

Yes, I still go there, but like my toilet-time Facebook doomscrolling, I forgot why.

 

Setting aside the "please refer to these other measurements" bit...

This really is a confusing product. Apparently it's capable of sounding good, but then gives you the option to make it sound bad if you want to do that for some reason, and then also has sampling rate issues that make it sound bad sometimes? This wouldn't be the first DAC that handles 48 better than 44.1, but... huh?

It's interesting that when it's working right and sounds good (which only ever happens with some sort of oversampling), it sounds... like a Cyan. I guess ultimately those modules sound a certain way.

 

It also repeats the same phase issue that Goldensound already found on the HiFiMan EF400. As for the rest, well, how does the vendor provided SDK for the XMOS handle oversampling? That’s probably what you’ll find going on here. If they’d really implemented their own oversampling I would expect that they’d tested it. This stuff isn’t rocket science, particularly not if you’re just using a standard filter design technique like the Remez exchange, LMS, or the window method. These problems don’t even need an APx to find either. At some point you have to conclude that Topping doesn’t know what they’re doing and at least in the digital domain they can’t find their own LPF with two hands and a map.

 

Is Golden AI generated now? So many filters. Sorry not sorry.

 

I'm not using any filters besides basic colour grading
I have lost quite a bit of weight in the last few months though and I feel like it's made my skin a bit better so that could be it

 

Congrats to you!

Linking the video which probably bumped the interest in this DAC again.

 

We need to create our own GoldenSound AI chatbot for the store when we aren't online, where we can adjust the amount of British the AI is. Nothing will sell our audio products like an accent.

 

British wins every time.

 

The Canadian accents aren’t good enough for you, eh?

 

The Canadian accent is too dangerous, we don't want folks falling in love with our AI.

 

Or they were listening to all the tariff talk and were proactive? The release date is before the election... and the herd mentality over at ASR is very real - saw what was a nice discussion about the Dynaudio Heritage Special among happy owners (like myself, though I don't have an acct there) totally derailed when some don't know shit jackass posted measurements without context and the hive mind swarmed.

Haven't heard this DAC and not in the market but at least they're kinda trying? With the number of features I too am curious where the corners were cut to hit that price point.