The headphone jack of modern smartphones looks like a beautiful forgotten dream and since no one wants to use outdated smartphones just for their headphones jacks, the audio industry needed to wake up from a bad dream and quickly adapt and develop a new type of product that a few years ago didn’t even exist: mobile DACs and headphone amp combos that could work perfectly connected to a smartphone. The requirement was pretty straightforward: it needed to be battery-powered, it shouldn’t drain the smartphone battery, it should offer a decent DAC chip and a clean, yet powerful headphone amp section.
The coolest product line in the SMSL family to us is their M line of desktop DACs. I’m quite sure you’ve seen at least once their latest designs with an elongated and colorful body. The super tiny and bus-powered M100 DAC to this day is praised as a very good entry-level DAC in the sub $100 category. M300 DAC added balanced outputs on the back and a much higher-end AKM4497 DAC chip was used for better performance.
Probably the biggest hype I ever encountered in the headphone kingdom was the announcement of THX AAA 789 headphone amp by Massdrop. People called it as the Holy Grail of headphone amplification, as an End-Game, shift+delete your head-fi account type of amp. Everybody dreamed about it and everybody wanted one. That is not because it was expensive, not at all, at only $400 it was among the cheapest balanced and powerful desktop headphone amp I knew about. Everyone dreamed about it because of the availability of that particular amp, the first batch was sold out in one hour I recon, the second batch sale lasted few hours and only the third one lasted a day or so. I am not that lucky by nature so obviously I forgot to pre-order one and put my hands on it. People were selling it on the used market at higher prices than MSRP! Its demand was much bigger than supply, the hype was real!
SMSL released a product line that is even friendlier with your pockets, which promises great performance at less than $250 per component. It is their S-8 line of which 3 products have been released so far: SU-8 Balanced DAC, SH-8 Balanced headphone amplifier and the DA-8 integrated amplifier that was upgraded recently to a new version, called DA-8S that I will be testing today.
If I ask you a few years ago about TOPPINGÂ you would raise your shoulders, however, nowadays it is a different picture as this brand also rhymes with good sound quality at very affordable prices. TOPPINGÂ took by storm the affordable audio market by releasing interesting desktop and portable units, their DX and D lines are still very popular among audio enthusiasts. When TOPPINGÂ released its highest performance D70 DAC not too long ago, it sent shock-waves in the audiophile community, it again raised the bar of what can be achieved with a modest sum of $500.
What a crazy and crowded year was 2019 for TOPPING. They were able to release not one, not two but three flagship DACs: the technical and serious DX7 Pro, its musical and playful brother D90 and the D70 that sits somewhere in the middle of those two. TOPPING didn’t forget their core fanbase and updated their 50 line and even added new affordable products, D50 was upgraded to D50s that made some nice quality of life changes for old-school loudspeaker enthusiasts, they added a much-needed A50 headphone amplifier and that must-have P50 external linear and regulated power supply that works with both of them.
Nobody believed single driver IEMs could sound as good as top-of-the-line multi-BA IEMs. That is until Sennheiser proved everybody’s wrong with the release of the single driver IE800 in 2012. It sounded so good that the IEM market changed forever, suddenly hybrid earphones made an appearance and other brands started embracing single driver IEMs. Today we will be testing an entry-level model of the Chinese manufacturer Moondrop Technology, that thanks to the unique color pattern on the IEM body and cable were simply named Starfield for obvious reasons.
This year was such a busy year for TOPPING and I’m sure it was their best one yet. TOPPING released two incredible DACs that can fight in the heavyweight category with bigger boys, D70 and DX7 Pro were such eye-openers that they made me wonder if much higher priced digital to analog converters made any sense. They are still tuning their top-of-the-line AK4499 based D90 DAC, but in the meantime, an update to their smaller and more affordable DAC category just happened with the release of the newest D50s DAC/Preamp and Bluetooth receiver. I’m told there is also an A50 headphone amplifier in the works that should pair nicely with D50s and the dedicated P50 power supply should solve any background noise issues you might have.
I knew TOPPING was brewing something new about one year ago, something that would sit on an iron throne in their product line, in the summer of 2019 I found out it’s their flagship D90 DAC that just entered its final polishing stage. Taking into consideration that TOPPING is playing with the reference AK4499 boards from AKM for about 2 years now, it’s clear to me that they didn’t rush this one as others might think. Yes, it is among the first available commercial DAC equipped with the newest and greatest DAC chip from AKM, but behind all that, D90 had a long research and development time and it’s finally ready to sing beautiful songs to the world.
TOPPING DX7 Pro delivers a solid performance on all fronts; it has everything a knowledgeable audiophile would desire and as result, I consider it an incredible all-in-one device packed with features that came as a bonus for a close to perfect audio performance. At just $100 more compared to the older DX7s I believe DX7 Pro fully justified its price and at $599 this is currently my best recommendation.