Here I was having tested the TOPPING D70 Pro SABRE and A70 Pro amplifier and realizing quickly this was cool and reckless at the same time. There is so much power on offer from the A70 Pro that I really wanted an ultra low gain mode to use with IEMs but even that is probably not enough. It is too easy to get IEMs far too loud to use with the A70 Pro and just as easy to accidentally blow up the drivers if you just turn that knob a bit too much. Use the remote control as much as you can and stick the DAC to a set negative volume to help further. I do appreciate the safe volume mode on offer though and this can be help prevent such issues. But suffice to say that it's best to use this amplifier with headphones and IEMs that benefit from the extra juice. Think low sensitivity planar magnetic/ribbon/AMT driver headphones, for example. The single-ended output can actually be made viable as-is for prosumer tools where high impedance headphones are quite commonly used, so there is another application which doesn't necessitate double checking the volume each time. The good news is there is volume memory on both devices so you can set the different levels for different outputs and have the stack remember it for you. It's worked flawlessly each time although I always made sure the numbers were as expected first.

So you can expect how perhaps having this potential concern can take away from a pleasant user experience, and then there was the "HP DC Abnormal" error which popped up in some early batch units. I can't speak about it since I didn't experience it and TOPPING did put out a firmware update that addresses this so hopefully that's the end of that. Suffice to say then that the A70 Pro came out to a bang—thankfully not literally this time—with glowing reviews before having a roller-coaster ride down and back up again. As of the date you see this review, I'd say feel free to ignore that error code and resulting complaints provided you do update the firmware. If you already purchased this, update the firmware as soon as possible even if you never experienced the issue.

This was a bit of a damper on what is otherwise a very impressive stack. TOPPING saw people asking for displays on its products and the D70 Pro/A70 Pro is the first time I see the display as being an integral part of these units. We had playback indicators before which are handy always but now there is a highly customizable setup menu with some cool features as well as a VU meter and FFT screen to look at too. The D70 Pro SABRE is also easily the best ESS-based DAC I've used to date in not coming off relatively bright and not having that trademark ESS distortion hump either. Perhaps ESS deserves some credit with the new ES9039PRO but TOPPING does too for its implementation here. There are plenty of filters to play around with, if you so please, as well as some sound modes which can give you a taste of tube-based DACs in terms of how they can affect timbre. The extensive inputs and outputs are nice to have as well and the end result is a desktop stack which now crosses the $1000 price range together. Perhaps the power output now makes more sense since no one is going to buy this to drive simple IEMs or headphones. TOPPING is targeting users with end game headphones here, especially with the promotional photos using the $6000 HIFIMAN Susvara which is one of the hardest headphones to drive properly. You will see people spending multiple thousands of dollars on just the headphone amplifier in such cases and sometimes the same amount on an accompanying DAC too. In that regard, the D70 Pro SABRE + A70 Pro stack feels like it is very good value. You could always pair the D70 Pro SABRE with a different amp if you are fine with less power and the same with the amp too if all you care about is a DAC giving out clean sound off RCA outputs. That's the benefit of going with separate DAC and amp units but these two still make a compelling argument to be bought together.