Can't hear it. But the cable microphonic is horrible

Thanks!

You have no evidence whatsoever that the measurements you speak of have any effect on listening preferences. Not a single study.

Are you a amir fan? Someone openly admitted they could not tell the difference between a single genelec 8361 and a pair revel salon 2? Is that who you are trusting to make subjective arguments about things sounding worse and better? 🤣🤣🤣🤣

Sorry its a video. https://youtu.be/Fa1y9JRip68 . Also check out Andrews video on SINAD https://youtu.be/DlwIGPEhfGU .

Yeah it seems to come down to chance sadly. My Sylvania had a buzz that didn't go away after burn in, but the new PSVane's were perfectly fine. I tried some WE403a and the GE replacement and the GE were good but WE weren't.

My HA-3A arrived yesterday; I have two sets of matched vintage tubes coming soon. In the meantime, I am putting the stock tubes thru the paces. This is a quality piece of equipment!

I am pretty sure I will be in the market for a new matching DAC (black) with a matching footprint.

Class D is the future, NAD will be the leading company when people realize they have been brainwashed by all the class A marketing. people resenting them cuz they don’t charge much and don’t have snake oil marketing. Time will tell. It is amassing how those ancient technologies that has been proven inefficient and highly noisy and discarded by almost all other fields are treated like a crown jewel in audio market.

I also started college as an EE major and switched to Business Administration 🤦🏻‍♂️. Yes, tubes are fun and beautiful to look at, and I still use them every so often, but technically they are inferior to todays technology. I’m especially impressed with the newest class-D amplification from Purifi and Hypex.

Very brave of u for speaking the truth lol, I buy tube amps just for the look, as a person with an EE background and talked multiple amp engineers, I full agree with u, and according to some OEM engineers those tube amp profit margin often times over 100 to its production costs. Any people can read circuitry diagram and have soldering techniques can easily produce those class A tube amps, slap a fancy casing, charging few thousands, brag about tUbe mAgIc, you’re sold, you’re in, and u will be in part of the cult

Nice! For me it was the Sylvania that has absolutely no humming. But I had great luck with Tung-Sol and EH too (after an actual burn in period of 24-48 hours on the EH).

But some tubes crackle when I move my potentiometer, which I find super weird. The Sylvania is the only one not doing that.

Do you have a link? I was just googling it and only found reviews and measurements of specific amps, no general writeup

Yeah, for me I tried to use 6SN7 tubes and ended up with PSVane since it had less buzz.

There are a load of measurements that go into how an amp performs that arnt covered by ASR. Golden sounds has a great write up about this. You are simply wrong about how psychoacoustics work.

Quobuz is my baby, so sorry some of you don’t have access to it. Hopefully that will change soon!

But what about the Apple dong?

/s

Damn, now I really wanna try one out. Unfortunately there aren't many places that allow you to test audiophile products by me. I think the only spot I know is Schiit's store in Santa Clarita but that's a few hrs away lol

Idk man, I thought this was a subjective hobby 🤔

The cayin sounds way better... To him. The Topping sounds better to you. There is room for both opinions lmao

There are music platforms that have Dolby Atmos mixed music, so with those services it would sound better than upmixing Spotify. Apple music, tidal, and amazon music all have Dolby Atmos content.

It sounds thinner and with less bass because you don't have 2nd and 3rd order harmonics trailing the sound.

Like I said, you like the sound of distortion and that's fine. But the A90D is technically better than any tube amp.

I have Dolby Atmos on my phone, I usually don't like spatial effects but I tried some Atmos tracks from Tidal and they sounded really great. They don't seem to be going for a goofy 3d effect were the instruments sound really wide apart, its immersive without sounding like a gimmick.

A90D is less detailed, thinner, less bass and worse texture of bass, less soundstage. I did an A/B comparison, its literally what I hear. The one objective plus for the A90D is the speed.

As someone who has spent over 15 years contributing to various tube audio forums; building and designing all sorts of tube amplifiers, these reviews make me lol irl. Maybe I’m just over the tube magic already. There is no way the Topping A90D sounds worse than the Cayin. You like the sound of distortion, period.

Congratulations, you did it right! Nothing like getting on here and seeing people get a Hifiman Aria and hating it as their first headphone lol

It's also the reflektor 6v6 tubes that were installed not just the sylvanias.