About 2 months ago I bought a Topping TP30 off ebay. It's a combo USB DAC, T-Amp, and headphone amp.
It's the first DAC or headphone amp I've bought so I can't compare it to others, but thought I'd post some initial impressions and a funny story.
When it arrived I tried it out with my Grado 325. Much to my chagrin, the left side was entirely missing, only to be heard if I torqued the cable to the left. I figured the headphone jack was defective. So, I emailed the seller in Hong Kong to ask him to send me a replacement. He said he'd refund my money if I shipped the amp back to him.
I didn't really want to spend time at the post office, particularly during the holiday season, so figured I'd see if I could just solder in a new jack myself.
I opened the amp up, flipped over the board and found, to my surprise, that the factory had forgotten to solder in the headphone jack! With a little bit of force, I could completely remove the jack from the board. That's some nice quality control...
Just a few minutes of fun with the soldering iron later, it looked like this:
Now it works and sounds fine.
So, bad QC aside, how does it sound?
Pretty nice. I haven't yet really given it a thorough listen with my SR325 yet, but can say that it sounds quite nice with Etymotic ER6i and Shure SE210. My customs are out for adjustment, so I haven't listened on those yet.
The speaker out sounds nice. A little warm, which I like.
I'll post an update when I do some detailed listening with my Grados, but for now, thought I'd share the hilarity of the jack.
