Article: Review | Denafrips Terminator Plus DAC and Gaia D to D Converter

[OldBigEars]

I'm afraid the author's assessment of the Topping D90 is throwing me off.  I bought and lived with this DAC for a month and tried every possible configuration, including the highly recommended DSD 256.  Personally...I really didn't enjoy it at all.  Yes I can agree that it extracted an etched kind of hyper-detail, but I never found it made coherent sense of the music.  I wanted to love this $699 DAC as it would have saved me a lot of money.  But I sent it back and haven't missed it for a moment. I replaced it with a Chord Qutest, which I enjoy orders of magnitude more than the Topping. I recall that this writer expressed his preference for the Pontus over the Chord. Which only goes to prove how subjective and system-dependent this whole hobby is.

[OldBigEars]

On 11/2/2021 at 10:02 PM, gmgraves said:

That is interesting. I had the use of a Chord Hugo 2 for a while and thought it to be wonderful, but I had no need for the headphone interface or portability of the battery power that it afforded. When the Qutest came out claiming to be the same digital circuitry as the Hugo 2, for about a thousand dollars less, I jumped on it. But, no matter what I did, I could not get the Qutest to sound anywhere near as good as the Hugo 2. So I sent it back after reviewing it!

The original Topping D90 (not the current one) sounded (to my ears) so much better than the Pontus II, that I sold the latter. When I received the T+/Gaia, I was literally flabbergasted and ended up buying it. I will guarantee that the Topping D90 is head and shoulders above the Qutest; at least it is in MY system.

So you are right, SQ is largely subjective. But, I have come to the inescapable conclusion that synergy between the various components in a system makes the difference between a particular component being gold to one listener and dross to another. Also, I believe that one’s taste in music, as well as one’s expectations has a lot to do with one’s likes and dislikes, sound wise. For instance, I hear a lot of live acoustic music (classical and jazz almost exclusively) and rock/electric guitars, essentially, never. I want my reproduction to sound like live, acoustic music, playing in a real space. Somebody who listens to studio-made rock music will likely prefer a totally different type of sound. My experience is that most rockers I’ve known go for a sound that enhances the excitement of a rock performance; ie, bright, aggressive highs and big bass. Play classical music through such a system, and frankly, to my ears, it sounds awful. Are the rocker’s wrong? Absolutely not. They are seeking one type of musical experience, while I’m seeking another. We are both right in our respective pursuits, but that pursuit will yield wildly different opinions about what constitutes “high fidelity”.

 

regards,

George

 

For the record, the core of my listening is 'modern jazz, blues, soul'.  I frequently listen to acoustic artists and occasionally I'll dig out some classic 70's rock.  On rare occasions, some classical too. My system loves the former genre as well as anything acoustic. It's probably not optimal for hard rock.