Class D is still not as good in 2024?

[sidvee]

Best is to listen for ourselves and decide free of any external influences or opinions as possible

It is what I have recommended from the past 12 years or so!

S

Post in thread 'Interesting Objective test on Cables'

Dec 5, 2012

It is the arm chair experts who read half information on the internet and drumroll the same that really annoy me.

Yes I concur ROC, that is my pet peeve as well. Anybody's personal experience is invaluable, but paraphrasing off the internet is really despicable.
Cheers,
Sid

• sidvee

S

Thread 'Arm Chair Warriors'

Jun 5, 2024

Armchair warriors

I know how to fly a plane. I have even sat in the jump seat of a 747 and observed every step the pilot made to safely land the beast. Despite this wealth of knowledge I suspect neither of us would be comfortable with me taking the controls of our next flight. Turns out that no matter how...

www.psaudio.com

Good post. Unless one has experienced something, all the theoretical knowledge, while good, is not very meaningful. And even worse is developing an opinion based on reading rather than experiencing and disseminating to others as gospel. Unfortunately seeing a lot of this recently.
Last time I posted something like this, one forum member got so upset that he stated that he doesn't have to snort cocaine (or some drug reference that I don't recall) to know how it feels! At that time I wondered how one can feel something by...

• sidvee

• 

Cheers,
Sid

 

[rwnano]

True all, but seems like v3 monoblock is a very popular product..both measures well as well as sounds good as per ASR and reddit real life reviews.

Fosi v3 monoblock is the only class D that has been

I always look at ASR review and most importantly the poll result where members, who own the product vote for it. The polls cannot be wrong (unless one takes a cynical view that all members who join ASR are some kind of retards). Review posts always start with few standard measurements. The most controversial figure are the SINAD numbers, which I never look at. I look for things like the frequency curves channel imbalance, AC noise creeping into the output, build quality, power supply, etc. Once the review is posted the thing that is more important is not the review but the posts by members who buy the product and posts issues they find with the product. The thing about ASR is that that many manufacturers take the measurements and the feedback seriously. Special mention must be made for three Chinese manufacturers Toppings, SMSL and Fosi. Many of the product improvements of the Chinese products are a result of the debates on the ASR forum. Similar to ASR, the diyaudio forum also has manufacturers part of the forum. The diyaudio forum is where the device is taken apart and shortcomings posted. One Indian manufacturer (Allo which has closed shop) was part of both these forums. I have taken at least two decisions thanks to ASR and diyaudio forum and I'm glad I did. Like it or not, forums like ASR and diyaudio are there to stay and IMO, they are doing a huge service to the gullible user who get swayed by youtube and audiophile magazine reviews.

And interestingly the fosi v3 monoblock next gen is reviewed well on ASR. Outstandingly well actually.

 

[mbhangui]

True all, but seems like v3 monoblock is a very popular product..both measures well as well as sounds good as per ASR and reddit real life reviews.

Fosi v3 monoblock is the only class D that has been

And interestingly the fosi v3 monoblock next gen is reviewed well on ASR. Outstandingly well actually.

The v3 monoblocks are better thanks to feedback on the ASR on the earlier Fosi audio v3 stereo amp. I'm about to order the fosi za3 instead which doesn't measure as good as the v3 monoblocks, but has balanced inputs. If it turns out to be good i will buy one more and biwire my polk RtiA9 floorstanders. I already have constructed a speaker switch which can switch between two different amps and two different pairs of speakers. The ZA3 will allow me to put the amps just next to the speaker and I can run a long balanced cable from my DAC to the amps. I have two DACs with balanced output so this amp will allow me to utilize them.

 

[rwnano]

The v3 monoblocks are better thanks to feedback on the ASR on the earlier Fosi audio v3 stereo amp. I'm about to order the fosi za3 instead which doesn't measure as good as the v3 monoblocks, but has balanced inputs. If it turns out to be good i will buy one more and biwire my polk RtiA9 floorstanders. I already have constructed a speaker switch which can switch between two different amps and two different pairs of speakers. The ZA3 will allow me to put the amps just next to the speaker and I can run a long balanced cable from my DAC to the amps. I have two DACs with balanced output so this amp will allow me to utilize them.

V3 monoblock also has balanced inputs XLR?

 

[rwnano]

Your DAC s must be expensive? I use topping d10s DAC...

 

[mbhangui]

V3 monoblock also has balanced inputs XLR?

It does have, but

1. It is not available online in any store in India
2. It is few dollars more and I can't justify that cost for few extra sinad value, which my ears will anyway not able to hear it. To biamp, i will require 4 of the monoblocks. With za3 I require just two which will cost me just Rs 27k.

 

[mbhangui]

Your DAC s must be expensive? I use topping d10s DAC...

The topping D10s is a good dac. I have it's balanced output equivalent D10b which is connected to my 20 band graphic equalizer, the output of which goes to a headphone amp feeding my HD650 headphone. The topping D10b drove me nuts making it work with mpd on my macbook and macmini. Ultimately I found that to be two cases of shoddy programming. One shoddy programming by Apple programmers and a shoddy programming by the Topping team which has an extra trailing blank space in the device name. I use mpd for all my music playback and this is the entry I had to make for mpd to make it work with D10b. The same issue is there for D10s, but it works on Linux where the ALSA driver ignores leading and trailing blank space in the ALSA hardware device name

audio_output {
type "osx"
name "Topping D10b"
device "D10b " # optional
mixer_type "disabled"
dop "yes"
}

I found this issue thanks to this post

Configuring mpd for bit-perfect playback on the Mac

Configuring mpd for bit-perfect playback on the Mac

hydrogenaud.io

If you are interested here is the linux code (Linus Torwards kernel tree) which uses the usb_audio_make_shortname() function to create a device name without the space. The call to strim() function at line 527 in the source code fixes this issue.

linux/sound/usb/card.c at master · torvalds/linux

Linux kernel source tree. Contribute to torvalds/linux development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

There are many such cases with real shady programming by apple. e.g. When you use samba, you cannot have @ in the password.

e.g. the following line mounts my Music drive on my macbook pro and mac mini. It uses the user pi with password pipinopi to access the share.
The host on which the share is present, is separated by the @ sign. So in this case 192.168.2.101 is the IP address on which the samba share lies

My /etc/auto_smb at the moment is like this

/System/Volumes/Data/MDrive -fstype=smbfs,soft,noowners,nosuid,rw ://pi:[email protected]:/MDrive

My earlier password for the share was pi@@9435. so /etc/auto_smb was like this

/System/Volumes/Data/MDrive -fstype=smbfs,soft,noowners,nosuid,rw ://pi : pi@@[email protected]:/MDrive

apple devices treats @[email protected] as the IP on which the samba share lies (the string after the first @ symbol) and naturally fails because this is not a valid IP address
Linux does it perfectly. It parses the IP address from backwards and correctly identifies the IP address as 192.168.2.101 even if the password has a @ symbol.

Unbelievable to see such shoddy programming from a billion dollar company

 

[rwnano]

It does have, but

1. It is not available online in any store in India
2. It is few dollars more and I can't justify that cost for few extra sinad value, which my ears will anyway not able to hear it. To biamp, i will require 4 of the monoblocks. With za3 I require just two which will cost me just Rs 27k.

V3 monoblocks will cost you 18 k per pair with the two 5amperes adaptor power supply. US friends can be asked

 

[Analogous]

True all, but seems like v3 monoblock is a very popular product..both measures well as well as sounds good as per ASR and reddit real life reviews.

Fosi v3 monoblock is the only class D that has been

And interestingly the fosi v3 monoblock next gen is reviewed well on ASR. Outstandingly well actually.

So, sometimes objective measurements and subjective opinions on a product can both be good.
Wonder how often this happens statistically and how we feel about it

 

[arunlouie]

Ayima max A07 is lowest I have seen, in amazon 5300 after card offer. Those who are interested can check.

 

[rwnano]

Please see

 

[mbhangui]

Please see

The problem with these youtube reviews is they tout the specs rated by the manufacturers as gospel. None of these amps actually can do the full rated power of the TPA3255 chip. They don't have a good thermal design. The whole thing is in a cramped space. Most of these amps will simply burn and get fried if you use the amp to deliver the full power. Safer option is to use 36volts power supply.