Topping DACs?

You have no idea what the hell you’re talking about. You have no idea about durability. They probably have none given SMSL/Topping’s past products. The shitty bunghole parts inside will die in a few years and probably fry much of what’s on the board. Meanwhile a 25 year old Sony CD player will still work. 40 year old power amps still work with recapping. Your opinions are delusional, misinformed, and retarded. Respecting them would place them as equivalent with those who have different taste in quite well built audio equipment than me with many positive attributes. I favor a mix of solid plain jane (not cheapo, cost-reduced budget crap) and very high end equipment. The SET, NOS, and transformer gangs have good points. Aluminum cone gang has some good points. BBC monitor gang has good points. Instead I mock your misinformed views and you for holding them.

 

More excuses and rationalizations. Why don’t you get a pair of shielded speakers instead of buying budget crap? Interference from an airport is jack compared to an old CRT monitor.

 

It still looks like a random cheap shit box. For 140$ you can get a cheapo Steinberg interface DAC (Yamaha) that looks 3x in quality compared to this. Let's be honest, Schiit case designs are laconic at best(PS. The big Schiit products look awesome though.), but at least not Chi-Fi garbage. On the plus side they have decent thick aluminum and steel casing. Pro /studio gear is often good/better looking while being utilitarian, which I prefer over most Hi-Fi gooey over-exaggerated design language. Over time you are starting to give less shit about it when you realize some 500 USD pro speaker amp can blow away Hi-Fi wannabe gear.

 

Um, no. These AKM chip dacs have a certain sound that go with some folks preferences. I just picked up an Asgard 3 that will eventually be a night stand unit, so I needed AIO functionality, and I did not get the low end multi-bit card because for this use case I prefer the detailed/smoothed AKM sound. I don't currently have any wolfson, but I do have a ti/bb amp/dac for phone use and it is its own flavor.

Wanting a straight up AKM flavor with a good USB implementation in this price range is a legitimate desire.

 

Wow, this is cyberbullying at its finest. Using derogatory and highly offensive terms that went out of fashion in the late 80s, when someone does not agree with you. It really speaks volumes about you and your character. You do not intimidate me and will continue to share my opinions with people who care about this hobby.

 

Yeah and the best gear, both pro and hifi, That which is pretty much cost no object, has insane case work. And it’s heavy. We’re taking heavy cases, cast and polished aluminum panels, expensive knobs, you name it. The casework sells the units to people who don’t care about the sound or people who are in a toss up between two boxes. The Bricasti comes in gold plate.

 

And at least the board house is an American military defense contractor, Virtex. Topping is SMSL

500 bucks also gets you 16 channels of warm pro sound used (nobody into home theater does this because boomy fragile AVRs are so popular) or a ton of good, huge sounding hifi gear pieces from the 70s-2000s. The used market has so much good stuff that still works going for dirt cheap.

There’s no real excuse for bad Chinese knockoff gear in hifi or pro audio. That stuff is worse than Behringer.

Edit: The way the Apogee and MOTU interfaces are implemented is mind bogglingly clever and cost efficient. One ESS Dac per 8 outs with the on chip digital volume control like it would be in an AV surround receiver yet the measurements aren’t declining too much and the sound is still better than most of the two channel gear that uses 4 channels on the chip averaged for l and r. Most AV receivers jsut collapse soundwise.

 

Cyber bullying? What? You’re just another brain dead chifi apologist getting mocked on the internet. I was nice enough to give you harsh, real talk advice. SMSL isn’t even a good dirt box. Web forums need a buy better gear light like the Yggdrasil.

 

It is simple. No one here is really impressed by these products.

 

I agree, except the market does not. There is this division between pro and consumer mid/fi and hi fi worlds. So @bboris77 and millions like him hit the web forums and audiophool sources (i.e. Stereophile and all the modern webzine equivalents) and are only exposed to Topping/chifi. Motu and the like are unknown - I never heard of them until folks like you and @purr1n pointed to them. Bashing folks over the head over these facts is no good. I consider SBAF to be one big "buy better gear" light

 

That is beside the point. There’s no need for baseless personal attacks.

 

I don't really care much. Grab a beer and follow along. f**k Psalmanazar when he gets too annoying. Every now and then I am thinking there is something seriously wrong with this guy, but at least you get a lot of useful info.

 

I get it. I have friends that can be politically incorrect. And I used to find his posts funny. At this point though I cannot make excuses any more for the blatantly racist undertone in this thread mainly coming from him (towards Chinese products). Plus he called me retarded lol.

 

Well the real divisions in hifi electronics are:

1. Known brand dealer hifi.
2. Boutique dealer hifi.
3. Direct sale hifi.
4. Box store hifi not sold at dealers.
5. Far East cheap crap.

And none of them will have anything to do with the other or be sold in the same stores.

pro audio has different divisions and companies like Focusrite will move themselves from the very very top to right above the very very bottom to make more money but you’ll still see the cheap 8 channel rack mounts in some real studios despite them being practically unusable for a lot of stuff and rather fragile. Those modern productions with 90 channels don’t need 90 good channels for something that’s going to be limited to 5 dB of dr. price doesn’t really correlate to quality very much outside of budget Chinese stuff mostly sucking balls and you get what you pay for until you spend 500-1000 bucks new for electronics. People just talk to each other and get to use various pieces and see what band mates have. So eventually you see Steve Albini using cheap FMR gear in an expensive studio and shilling the crap out of it despite awful casework because its quite good and a lot of the haters just don’t know what the sweet spots are. Certainly better than what Focusrite and Warm are making in China now.

 

Yea, but f**k China and their whole Wuhan virus world domination effort to take over cheap Hi Fi

 

You mean “Chinese Virus” as coined by the great leader of the Western Civilization. Lol.