Review on 🎵 Topping E30 Mini Stereo DAC HiFi AK4493: Ultimate Home Theater Game Music Decoder in Black by Jeff Callier

TLDR; After a lot of research, Topping E30 is a great DAC and found some polarity issues. I took a chance to buy now and it turned out that there are no polarity issues, this is a serial number 2004+ 😊 I spent probably a month deciding which DAC to buy. I spent hours debating whether I needed a balanced XLR for future upgrades. I've compared Geshelli, SMSL, and Topping offerings, which appear to be similar with different feature sets. Then I came across the E30. I've been patiently waiting for reviews of the new SMSL M200 DAC to come out, which I was previously convinced of. I realized that the M200 was overrated and not particularly valuable. If the E30 were balanced, it would be the best DAC in the price range. I don't know if it matters; The sound quality reproduced by the E30 is incredible. You can look at the oscilloscope readings which will tell you why the DAC is the best which scientifically has the cleanest signal. The benchmarks of the E30 are surprisingly high and, like the DAC, test over 300% of the recommended retail price in many tests. WOW. These include linearity, distortion and dynamic range. This caused me to reconsider whether I even care if the device has a balanced XLR output. I started investigating the tiny differences between RCA and XLR to see if I really cared about XLR. As much as I'd love to have XLR to upgrade a powered monitor and power a 789 in balanced mode, most powered monitors still have RCA. Also, RCA does not experience significant signal degradation compared to short distances. All of these factors led me to conclude that the E30 was something that hit the mark for budget DACs. So high that I was willing to buy these with 0 ratings from HiFi-College made by KGUSS. I assure you this is the correct DAC with the correct serial number and it is fantastic. Stop hesitating, just take it. What I learned: 1. Read the manual when you get it and switch it to DAC mode if you don't want to use the preamp. After that, the display only shows the bitrate and no longer only works as a DAC.2. I would suggest leaving the windows volume at 99 without much explanation to allow the DAC to work with little overhead. Additional information can be found by searching for DACs and the Gibbs phenomenon.