I remember Guy’s Snell Ks singing beautifully with my AI Alto at a bakeoff years ago.
2 Likes
New piece of Chinesium has arrived for office desktop system. Will set it up later on today hopefully. Will replace the buzzy, humming piece of Chinesium that’s in situ. Looks and feels pretty well made for the money.
3 Likes
Looks like Wiim are releasing an amp in the UK soon, haven’t tried the streamer but it seems to be getting really good feedback.
Looking to replace the Sonos amp in the bedroom that died 
so will be looking for something like that soon.
I’ve got one here at the moment.
The HDMI implementation is sluggish and it’s not completely silent in standby (of note for bedroom use) but it’s ridiculous for £299.
1 Like
Which power supply does it come with?
The TPA3255 chip does seem very good for its cost, and is appearing in a number of inexpensive Chinese amps. I have a couple of Aiyima A-07s and a BRZ which use it.
2 Likes
What sort of noise, psu hum/buzz?
You still liking the DMP-A8? I’ve just fucked Roon off into the long grass and bought an A8 to replace Roon and the DAC
I splashed out the extra £7 to upgrade from the 32V to the 48V version.
1 Like
I have been using my A07 max on my tweeters - The volume control works sensibly for me normal operation is at the 12 O’clock - Goldilocks sensitivity for me. It’s good enough to easily show the differences between my array of tweeters - My Nobsound TPA 3116 that I used before never gave unquestionable output quality
Haven’t tried it on my mid ranges yet but need to do that sometime.
1 Like
Sort of a noisy diode style noise on this one. I’ll try and record it.
Its very good. For me, it has the issue that, unless you specifically need an analogue input, the extra cleverness doesn’t necessarily make it better than the A6 but there is no arguing it is a formidable bit of kit.
I’ll not be doing anything as fancy as that so should be adequate for my needs, iphone - Topping dac - A07 Max - Old Audica AV speaker.
The AV speaker was a passive LCR soundbar that sits along the back of my desk. I just use left and right speaker inputs on it, I’m only 1m away tops. Need to change that out at some point for either a tiny set of monitors or ideally I fancy trying a pair of Eclipse TD307 which are supposed to excel at nearfield.
1 Like
They were stunning in Chrome. I almost bought one several times!
Chose the A8 over the A6 for the (supposedly) better Op Amp and the r2r volume as I want to use it as a preamp.
Will need the analogue input as although the AI300 has a builtin phono if I want to use the 45 or 300B amps I need an external phono stage.
Read they are also supposed to be adding Dirac live to the A8 at some point.
In this use case the A8 makes sense. I don’t see exactly how it’s going to do Dirac though. There’s no mic input so, unless they somehow allow one of the USB sockets to support a setup mic, I can’t see how you’d get the measurements to it. The EQ stuff is impressive though if you know what data to feed it.
Not sure, apparently the AKM supports embedded Dirac filters/processing
Possibly install Dirac on a laptop with a USB mic and then upload the measurements via the eversolo app (or their web API)
TBH I wasn’t impressed with MiniDSP stuff but Dirac Live did look very good when I played around with it standalone.
My Arcam doesn’t have a mic input. You do it all on a pc via the network. So usb mic/soundcard.
1 Like
A friend has the A6me, currently used as streamer/dac outputting via s/e to his amp. He’s tempted to get the A8 as a sonic upgrade, are you suggesting not much in it sonically, you’re largely buying added features in the A8?
The A6 has the ESS Dac, and the A8 has the AKM Dac.
1 Like
I have had the A8 for near on a month now and it’s great but I don’t seem to be using any of the additional functionality it has over my Lumin. Also I plugged the Lumin back into the system yesterday and I swear it sounds slightly better or definitely as good as so I’m considering moving the A8 on while I can recoup a decent chunk of my outlay and keeping the Lumin as I pretty much just stream from Tidal.
2 Likes
I’m still using a Lumin D1 with my Aesthtix Pandora. I’m pretty sure that has been my streaming front end for about five years. I know you had a similar setup at one stage. I forsee no need to change unless something stops working with Roon.