Introduction

TOPPING is an audio brand popular in the PC desktop space for its range of affordable and good quality DACs and headphone amplifiers alike. We’ve previously covered several of its products including the budget-friendly E30 II/L30 II stack, the more expensive and equally impressive E50/L50 stack and the newer, premium E70/E70 stack which offers different DAC options too—the E70 Velvet is a nice pick—finally making our way to TOPPING’s more known D-series DACs and A-series amplifiers with the D70 Pro Sabre/A70 Pro stack that offer not only ridiculous amounts of power, but also two displays you could customize to show real-time playback data, a VU meter, and an FFT screen. Today we up the ante further with TOPPING’s latest DAC and accompanying amplifier, both of which aim to take on the more bespoke source component brands.

TOPPING shook the premium headphone amplifier market in 2020 which, until then, was mostly in the “more power = more money” mindset. The original A90 amplifier along with the accompanying D90 DAC offered a lot of juice for even the most demanding headphones at a very reasonable price and this opened the floodgates for a lot of companies to put out affordable and powerful solid state amplifiers. Today we examine the latest version of the D90 flagship DAC—the aptly named D90 III Discrete which uses a fully-discrete 1-bit DAC with native DSD playback designed by TOPPING, as opposed to use a third-party DAC from the likes of ESS, AKM, Cirrus Logic etc. This is a big step in TOPPING’s journey to showcase its engineering prowess and do the same to higher-end DACs that it has done to more formulaic sources before. Along with it, we also take a look at the A90 Discrete headphones amplifier and preamp, which uses NFCA discrete amplification modules and an R-2R relay volume control. The two together don’t have fancy VU screens, let alone a color display, instead aiming to maximize the sound quality you get out of the chain. These are in fact less “clean” than TOPPING’s own less-expensive delta-sigma architecture sources, in that the THD/dynamic range etc. numbers are less impressive—even assuming you can tell the difference outside extremely expensive measurement equipment and not your ears—but offer parametric EQ profiles and other quality-of-life improvements that will no doubt interest many. Thanks to TOPPING for providing review samples to TechPowerUp, and let’s begin with a look at the product specifications below. Be sure to click the images twice to fully open them and go through all the details.

Specifications

TOPPING D90 III Discrete DAC:

TOPPING A90 Discrete Amplifier:

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