Launched in late 2019, TOPPING's extraordinary D90 made waves among the audiophile community, and now finally the D90's MQA ready counterpart is available. In terms of hardware the only change vs the base model is the upgrade to a XMOS 216 chipset on the MQA variant over the original's 208. It's likely the new chipset is present to aid in the MQA decoding the original does not support. I, for one, appreciate that TOPPING chose to utilize a more powerful XMOS USB interface to aide in the added MQA support, which is available only through USB input.
All my best headphones that I am using right now are planar magnetics and that is not because I don’t like dynamic headphones or that those are weaker in technology, that is not true. I just feel connected to my music a lot more with them. I still didn’t listen to all dynamic headphones or to all planar-magnetics so I am still open-minded. I know a day will come when I will have goosebumps all over my body listening to some dynamic headphones as I am having right now with an LCD-4 from Audeze, that day will surely come, but not yet. I do appreciate some good measurements; I do appreciate linearity and I do appreciate all the technicalities a transducer can have in a headphone or speaker form. But I care the most if that acoustic membrane will be capable of creating music and emotions.
What speaker brand comes to mind first when I say, electrostatic speakers? For us Europeans, it’s most probably Quad and for Yankees, it is most probably Martin Logan. I still remember searching for a nice floor-stander that works with rock music and Quad ESL will always pop into that list. Since the headphone market has grown exponentially in the past years, Quad decided to have a small slice of that huge pie. The weird thing is that Quad decided to go with a planar-magnetic design and not with an electrostatic one. I’m however very glad they chose this (rightful and dangerous) path. I don’t like to fiddle with additional electronics just to listen to a pair on headphones, I’m sure Quad had the same thought.
Meze Audio – a relatively new name in the rather crowded landscape of headphones makers. From affordable models to works of art, anyone can afford and pick something up. One thing is certain, listening to music via headphones become very popular in the world of HiFi, music lovers no longer have the time sitting on the couch and enjoying their favorite albums on a pair of loudspeakers, everything is portable nowadays, on the move and at a very fast pace.
From the start, I can tell you that element X is again a pioneer in terms of feature set since not a single commercial DAC will offer the same quality-of-life improvements and features that element X is bringing to the table, all about that in a minute.
Considering that TA-30 is an all-tube design, I expected a slower and a mellower tonality, but xDuoo managed to impress me with a neutral, transparent, energetic and faster sound presentation. It borrowed some of the greatest stuff from solid-state amplification and added some tube goodness on top. Accounting for everything it does right, $710 seems like a small price to pay for the greatness that awaits.Â
I’ll be honest with you; I never tried any audio devices by xDuoo until today. They are quite popular around the internet, mainly their small and portable DAC and headphone amps are making lots of appearances here and there. Since there are a lot of reviews for their solid-state DAC and headphone amps, we decided to do a different one, we are reviewing their much underrated TA-10: a tube-based desktop headphone amp and DAC combo.