I worry a little bit about the DX5’s longevity as the reliability and quality of their products have been known to have some issues before.

TOPPING EX5 Headphone Amplifier DAC 2x ES9038Q2M Bluetooth 5. TOPPING EX5 Headphone Amplifier DAC 2x ES9038Q2M Bluetooth 5.

Its conversion stage is indeed based on two ES908Q2M DAC chips and allows the reading of high resolution audio streams, while ensuring an incredible precision and sound richness. After that’s taken care of, open Tidal, select the output device, go to settings and enable Software Decode Disabled and Exclusive Mode and you’re done. This is a review and detailed measurements of the Topping EX5 produced exclusively for Shenzhenaudio. The line outs do have a noticeable volume difference so keep this in mind when doing line out to a different amp or speaker amp.

I (barely) prefer the sound of the Burson, but that’s just me – the Burson has more power if you need it and you can op amp roll if that’s your thing. The DX5 is very lightweight, normally a desirable trait, but for a DAC/AMP, it’s kind of annoying – plugging in anything requires you to hold on to the DX5 so it doesn’t slide off your desk and become a heavy paperweight on the floor. Speaking about that, thanks to the newest XU-216, to its higher processing power (2000 Mips) and RAM size, EX5 is capable of fully decoding MQA files. No matter if you are using the 4-pin XLR or the regular headphone jack, you’ll be getting the same results and by that, I mean a clean, undistorted power that lacks noise even at maximum volume…but it wouldn’t stretch that stage wide open and it wouldn’t fill those musical layers with a lot information.

Topping | Electromod Topping | Electromod

It is a certified Hi-Res Audio decoder with full MQA, native DSD512, 32-Bit/768kHz PCM decoding support. I like the hip dac because it has a decent balanced power output but it struggles with properly powering full size headphones and the difference is noticeable when switching between the hip dac and the EX5. While you could leave the EX5 on all the time, I found the unit to get fairly warm in standby and I'll get into my thoughts on that a little later in the review. While it doesn’t focus on the emotional side of music listening, how their D30 PRO and D70S did for me, you can still counterbalance that linear tonality with a correct system matching.Long time Tech Enthusiast, an ambitious petrol-head, Yagiz likes his gadgets and always finds new ways into the tinkerer's world.