I’ve been using my Topping G5 now for a week. This is truly a magnificent product, looks like it was made by Nagra, but the $299 this costs would not even cover the sales tax if it was made by Nagra. I’m mostly a two speaker stereo listener, and I’ve owned many of the top end DAC from Spectral, MSB, Berkeley and most recently Meitner. This unit holds its own with all of these. I’m listening to it with Focal Utopia and JH Audio Angie CEIMs. These headphones have never sounded better. Two previous HP amps i owned were the Sony TAZ and the Focal Arche.
The synergy with the Utopia on the medium gain setting is amazing. These are highly resolving HPs that can sound a bit bright. The Focal Arche on the Utopia setting will tame much of the harshness, but some detail is lost. With the G5, the Utopia are smooth as silk, with seemingly unlimited dynamics and yet the micro details are also superb. The bass on the Utopia with a slight EQ via Roon, sounds fantastic, goes deep when it should, very controlled and detailed.
My two channel stereo is highly optimized, with power conditioning, professional room treatment by RPG, TAD R1s bi amped and set up with the help of Andrew Jones, convolution filter designed by Mitch Barnett … I finally ran out of things I could do to make it sound better. So I started listening to headphone, but it wasn’t until I got the G5 that the headphones became compelling. What is most amazing to me is how I can hook up my iPad to the G5 and get this sound, all the while running on a few batteries, totally portable.
