I had this DAC for about one week. I tend to take about one month to review audio equipment and test everything, but… I just did not want to listen to the D50III for more than one week.
Coming from a Wolfson chipset (Moon 100D) or an AKM chipset (Xduoo XD05 Basic), the difference was impressive. It’s almost as if the Topping D50III is V-shaped. Whereas the Wolfson, and even the AKM, are all about in-your-face, full mids and low-mids. The Topping D50III, with it’s dual ESS chipsets, for me, seems to be all about the treble and the bass, complimented with left-right separation like I’ve never heard before… but is it a good thing? TL,DR: Not for me.
Speakers sound great when they “disappear”. With the D50III, this extreme separation means my two (near-field) speakers don’t paint the stage in front of me, they just sound like… two speakers. And with either speakers or headphones (paired with my Aune X7S headphone amplifier), yes, you get a ton of soundstage, but the mids seems to be just there “as an afterthought”. I often said my Aune X7S (amp) was my Fostex T50RP’s (headphones) best friend, injecting soul into these V-shaped, powerful, fast, mechanical, analytical planars. Well, D50III → X7S → T50RP’s sound soulless. And there’s no depth whatsoever to speak of.
I’m not saying the D50III is horrible. I mean, to each their own. The Topping D50III is just… like my beloved T50RP headphones, in the form of a DAC. i.e.: Excellent for electronic music, rock, metal, etc. Can I listen to absolutely everything with my T50RPs? Yes, and I often do. Will I recommend my beloved T50RPs to listen to jazz, acoustic music, female vocals, something like that? Never. And that’s how I feel about the D50III. It’s fast. It’s detailed. The treble sparkle and clarity is all there. You’ll never have the impression the DAC is “too slow” to extract all the information from the mp3/wav/flac file (to be expected considering it supposedly does 768khz or something like that – which is 16 times the information you get in your 48khz files). But this unreal clarity is the problem for me… It also simply means it doesn’t sound real.
Conspiracy theories incoming.
You know, when “THX” amplifiers arrived, and their “0.0000-something-percent total harmonic distortion”, some audiophiles were talking about the possibility that these amps were just “removing” what’s distorted to trick the measurement tools. i.e.: The amp was seemingly engineered not to prevent distortion, but to remove it when it sees it, and by doing so, a ton of the information in your mp3s/wavs/flac files (etc.) was NOT sent to your ears. Resulting in a crisp, clear, but “lo-fi”, 0.0000-something-percent distortion, endgame-on-paper headphone amplifier. That’s how I feel after listening to the D50III (and it’s ASR-verified 0.00007% distortion @ 122db).
I am NOT saying removing data is what Topping (or THX!) does (and in a DAC, I believe this is just literally physically impossible). This is just such a different experience… that this is how it FEELS to me.
Hell, I did not even listen to any of these THX amps yet (and still want to try one). But for me, after being accustomed to one AKM or Wolfson DAC “in the middle, (only one DAC, duh) and engineered with a preference for the mids”, switching to two ESS chips “at the left and the right, without this mid preference” made such an enormous difference, it’s what this remembered me of. Crispness. Clarity. Detail. Resolution. Impressive separation and left-right soundstage. But nothing “in the middle of the stage”, no depth whatsoever too, and nothing in the mids. No impression the singer is “there” with me or in the room, compared to my Moon 100D (Wolfson chipset), or even my 100$ Xduoo XD05 Basic (AKM chipset).
Detail monster, but at what cost?
Maybe if I would have kept listening, I would have found every little detail I’ve searched for in a few of my preferred songs. But the lack of “everything else I’m searching for in a DAC“ was just not worth it for me. It just doesn’t work, for me, in my system. Seriously, play something with the XDuoo XD-05 Basic (the AKM chipset version), and then D50III, to someone who say “there’s no difference between DACs”, and if he doesn’t hear a difference, he’s quite deaf.
It’s all about the synergy.
This is not my DAC. It belongs to my friend, and he uses it mostly in a room with, more often than not, old speakers. Old speakers, which all tend to lack the highest levels of treble, and the lowest of the low hertz. And he loves the D50III. I get it. The separation, the 1/4"-to-XLR outs, the integrated bluetooth/LDAC input, paired with big, fat, good old mid-oriented speakers, in a big room? It could be great. It’s just not for me, not for my room. And it’s not the sound signature I’m going for, with either my near-field speakers or straight into my headphones. It’s still a great DAC to reinvigorate old speakers by throwing em low bass and sub-bass, crisp treble, speed and detail (plus modern bluetooth LDAC connectivity), and it’s probably at its best place in these environments. But for headphones and/or a small room with near-field speakers – especially if you do not need bluetooth – you can get way more for way less money.
Maybe the Topping D50S is a better alternative for me.
Nope, I’m not a Topping hater (yet? lol). When the Topping D50S arrived, years ago, this “768khz/dual dac/bluetooth LDAC” do-it-all combo seemed like the endgame for me. And I’m thinking maybe it still is great… because the D50S got something the D50III doesn’t have: The ability to switch opamps. Which pretty much can make as much of a difference as getting a new DAC, only by changing a lil’ chip inside it. I see the potential of dual dacs, and love the idea of having a DAC with bluetooth AptX/LDAC/etc included. So my next step is to get a Topping D50S (which are even 100$ or less nowadays!) and put a Muses02 opamp (or similar) in it to see how good it can get at mids and depth – knowing it is already great at soundstage and bass and treble details.
P.S.: No, I don’t use EQ – I don’t use USB in my system actually – so could not use the integrated EQ to “artificially” get more mids either… and mid-oriented headphones did not give me the “mid depth” I was looking for.