Setup and Performance

Setup

SHENZHENAUDIO provided all three of the products we spoke about thus far and it also sells the E70/L70 and E70V/L70 combo while throwing in a discounted set of XLR interconnects. The retailer was kind enough to send a set to use in this review which happens to be the exact same Fanmusic C006 20 cm XLR interconnects that sell for $70 separately, meaning the combo allows for a $40 discount. These ship in a separate box and use 6 mm diameter Japanese copper wires in a 2-core configuration that gets a cross-linked polyethylene insulation and a soft PVC/neoprene shell. On either end of the 20-cm cables are ROXTONE black gold-plated Neutrik 3-pin male or female XLR plugs; these seem to be and certainly behave as very good quality interconnects.


If you decide to have the TOPPING L70 amplifier paired with either the E70 or E70V DAC as a stack, note that the provided interconnects from SHENZHENAUDIO are quite supple yet on the longer side for when the two are literally stacked one above the other. The 20-cm length is better used for when you have the two devices on a rack system, for example, else I would certainly like to see an option for 10-cm long interconnects for those planning to use the stack on a desk. Then you need to consider about the other cables required to where, for me anyway, I had the two power cables and the USB cable on the DAC in addition to plugging in the Bluetooth Antenna for when I wanted to use my phone as the source connected to the DAC. The stack is quite solid with all these cables owing to the size and the aluminium alloy chassis used so you do not need to worry about this budging or tilting in either direction in use.


Connect the power plugs and turn on the stack using the two switches on the back to be greeted by a white standby light. You can then use the remote control or the capacitive button on the left to turn on either or both of them to be greeted by a nice white LED display which is a massive upgrade for me over the orange ones used on the previous TOPPING products we saw. There's a hint of pink hue to the white here but it's not as visible in person as on the photos above. You will notice that both displays show the current volume level from a range of 0 to -99 with -100 being mute, the current I/O mode, as well as playback rates as applicable. You can use the buttons on the units to get to what you want to do but really the remote controls are your best bet here. This is especially handy for the L70 amplifier that has eight output settings depending on whether you want to use it for headphone out, preamp, or both. These eight settings can have their individual volume and gain levels memorized onboard and this makes it very easy to use the E70/L70 combo for a variety of applications with different input and output connections. It's far more than a simple desktop DAC/amp stack for USB audio input and headphones output thus! I also appreciated the auto on/off functionality built in all three of these products whereby they turn on immediately when an audio signal is sent and go into a standby state after one minute of inactivity to save power.


I did try Bluetooth input on the E70V DAC to see how well it worked, with the DAC automatically going to pairing mode and recognized by my phone. It offers Bluetooth 5.1 connectivity with a rich codec support including SBC, AAC, aptX, aptX HD, aptX LL, aptX Adaptive, and LDAC, with my phone in LDAC mode doing a good job offering that flexibility of having the stack on my office desk when I cared less about the best possible sound quality and more about convenience. There's also coax and optical inputs offered here with up to 24-bit, 192 kHz playback for use with TV tuners, turntables, CD players etc.


The bulk majority of my testing was done with USB input to the DAC and here the display will confirm that the E70V defaults to 32-bit, 48 kHz PCM playback in Windows. Indeed, the sound controls in Windows confirm as much and you can get 24/32-bit PCM playback up to 384 kHz directly without needing any drivers. Your preferred media player should also see it and allow PCM/DSD playback. Roon also sees the device but doesn't identify it, so you have to enable it and set it up in the audio settings tab there.


If you have a device that doesn't accept UAC 2.0, or simply want to try other options, then the TOPPING-skinned XMOS/Thesycon USB audio device drivers will be of interest to you. You can find the installer on the downloads page and the latest version at the time of testing was v5.57.0 from March 2023. Installation is trivial as seen above, and these drivers now allow you to make the most of the TOPPING stack within the Windows operating system.



What these drivers do after installation is create a new output device in Windows, also providing access to the TOPPING USB DAC Driver Control Panel. You would mostly use these drivers in newer Windows builds if you want to have the stack as an ASIO (Audio Stream Input/Output) device. Set the format to your choosing and choose the buffer size based on latency requirements. With that done, go to your media player of choice. I demonstrated above with JRiver and Roon again and set the audio player to the same output. At this point, you can implement further tweaks, but those are player dependent. These drivers also provide 16-bit playback support as seen above, and Roon automatically allows for native DSD playback upto DSD512.


It goes without saying, but the TOPPING E70 has the exact same user experience. I didn't want to show it all over again so please see above two images that confirm the E70 works and is recognized as a separate device from the E70 VELVET.

Audio Performance

Now that we have a good idea of the capabilities and features of the TOPPING E70/E70V DAC and the L70 amplifier, let's talk about how they actually sound and also whether there is a discernible different between the two DACs. Here is an example setup with the HIFIMAN HE1000se planar magnetic headphones, as well as the recently released all-BA Kiwi Ears Orchestra Lite (review coming soon). The HE1000se isn't the most demanding of headphones but benefits from more current to where it helps test the NFCA-based amplification circuitry on the TOPPING L70. It's also one of the more notorious sets for channel imbalance with a lot of amplifiers at lower volumes, so I am happy to confirm the R-2R volume control on the L70 works fine and the multiple volume control modes come in handy too. There's something about those relays clicking each time you turn the L70's volume knob which makes me want to use it over the remote control itself! I also deliberately chose the Orchestra Lite because it's one of the most sensitive IEMs out there to where you can get a background hiss from overly powerful sources. Indeed, with numbers as high as 7.5 W per channel off the balanced connectors at 32 Ω, the TOPPING L70 is incredibly powerful and can get basically any headphones more than loud enough. The single-ended connector is also plenty capable to where I don't really see the need to hit high gain (+14 dB) at all here. I did have some hissing with the Orchestra Lite and some Campfire Audio IEMs thus, so keep that in mind since the otherwise black background and ultra-low output impedance still only work well in conjunction with a well-matched use case. Higher-impedance dynamic driver headphones and low sensitivity planar magnetic headphones seem like a good choice here. If anything, all those people who thought the TOPPING A90 was a wonderful amplifier should be ecstatic that the L70 seems to do basically the same for a much lower price. Do make use of the preamp functionality on either DAC or amp (or both) and you should be able to manage most IEMs too—the Symphonium Helios comes to mind—if not necessarily a good fit for all of them.


As with most such linear amplifiers, the TOPPING L70 amp is acoustically transparent. This means the sound signature of your headphones, IEMs, and speakers will not be changed when driven through the amplifier at least. Indeed, I dare say this is all you could ask from a headphone amplifier, unless you are deliberately looking for a colored sound signature, and I mentioned above how it's suitable but not necessarily the best amplifier you can get. Paired with the E70 or E70V, now we are looking at a highly capable stack that can do quite a few things. I measured the frequency response of the two stacks here to where the difference ends up being between the two DACs only, and we see it's well within error margins. Both combinations are flatter than anything I could ever ask for and I will go far enough to say there's no real difference between the two in this regard. However, I will say that the E70V—even if it technically measures worse—sounded better to me. I am not sure if it's a result of all the ESS DACs sounding too dry to me now to where the AK4499EX feels actually more engaging across the board. It could be the DAC implementation at hand too but, and this is a teaser for later, I have another DAC here which uses two of these AKM chips and it might be the best sounding source I've used to date! All other things being the same, I'd personally pick the E70V over the E70.