DAC & Headphone Amplifier
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• Immaculate sound
• A plethora of connections
• Easily readable displays
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• Lacklustre manual
RRP $2,199
Some five or six years ago, I began noticing talk online of Chinese manufacturer Topping. The brand appeared to focus on developing DACs and head-fi (headphone) electronics -nothing too surprising there. But the websites that scrutinise such things found stunningly good performance figures for these surprisingly affordable devices.
In late 2020 — oh, weren’t those the days! — I found myself in need of a DAC and possessed fewer dollars than I would have liked, so I bought a low-cost Topping E30. It isn’t a headphone unit: it simply takes an optical, coaxial or USB digital audio signal from a digital source component or computer and converts it to analogue to output through its line-level RCA sockets.
Later, I measured it. With 24-bit audio, the A-weighted noise level was close enough to -120dB. And everything else was equally good. Today, it remains the DAC that turns digital music on my desktop computer to line-level analogue, which in turn feeds my connected sound system: Dynaudio Emit 20 speakers on IsoAcoustic stands, driven by 100 watts per channel of Class A/B power.
The E30 cost just over $200, but here I’m going twelve rounds with Topping’s latest premium model costing over ten times the price. The DX9 combines high-end DAC performance with a powerful headphone amplifier.
DIGGING INTO THE DETAILS
The Topping E30 I own is a small box that isn’t unattractive but clearly utilitarian in its intent. The DX9 Pro’s design, meanwhile, is very, very different… yet still somehow quite utilitarian. The 340mm-wide unit is encased in an impressively solid aluminium body. Well, most of it is. The bulk of the top is a transparent pane of, I believe, glass, through which the main circuit board can be seen, and upon which is printed a lightly rendered block diagram showing the important sections of the circuit. (The image on page 20 illustrates this most clearly.) To this, I shall return.
Inside the unit, running along the top of the rear panel, is a row of fourteen amber LEDs that cast a glow across the innards, as you can see in the image above. I’m not sure I like it, but you might. You can adjust the glow’s brightness in the DX9 Pro’s settings to three levels, or switch them off entirely which, to my eye, makes for a cooler look, both figuratively and literally.
‘TOPPING’ is machined into the top panel, which also bears official ‘Hi-Res AUDIO’ and ‘Hi-Res AUDIO WIRELESS’ stickers, as well as a machined-in ‘15th Anniversary’. But besides the top-panel window, the most visually arresting feature is the rounding of the chassis sides.
Central on the front panel is a large control knob that you can turn to select the output level and navigate the settings menu, or press, with the press action assignable to one of several functions. At the far left is a standby button that also invokes the menu
