ЦАПы — TOPPING Centaurus DAC

The Centaurus is a fully balanced desktop DAC from TOPPING built on an R2R resistor ladder rather than a delta-sigma chip, developed in partnership with HOLO Audio. It combines a USB and Bluetooth receiver, a preamplifier with remote volume and a touchscreen in one chassis, and two case colours are listed, black or silver.

Key specs that matter

The conversion stage uses an eight-channel resistor array. Output is selectable between two levels - 2.1 V or 2.6 V at the RCA sockets and 4.2 V or 5.2 V at the XLR sockets at 0 dBFS. Both SNR and dynamic range reach 126 dB from the single-ended outputs and 130 dB from the balanced ones. THD+N is below 0.0005 percent at 1 kHz, and response stays within 0.6 dB from 20 Hz to 20 kHz and within 2.2 dB up to 40 kHz. Crosstalk measures -121 dB on RCA and -130 dB on XLR, with output impedances of 50 and 100 ohm respectively and channel balance of 0.3 dB. The box measures 37 x 24 x 9 cm and weighs 2.1 kg.

Engineering and use context

PCM and DSD are handled by separate paths. One side of the board is optimised for DSD through what TOPPING calls a Vector Step Resistance Network, while the other side decodes PCM through a conventional R2R ladder. Clock signals are processed in a CPLD, and jitter is quoted at -150 dB. Three decoding modes are offered - NOS plays at the original sample rate with no oversampling, OS applies oversampling to lower quantisation noise, and Best picks the oversampling rate automatically from the incoming format. USB uses a third-generation XMOS XU316 receiver with Thesycon drivers and accepts PCM up to 768 kHz and 32 bit plus DSD512, working with Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS and Android. A QCC5125 chip provides Bluetooth 5.1 supporting SBC, AAC and LDAC plus three aptX variants - standard, HD and Adaptive - at up to 96 kHz and 24 bit. An I2S input is also fitted. The 5 cm colour touchscreen with three touch buttons can show an FFT view, VU meters or playback data in nine background colours, and a 10-band parametric EQ allows frequency, gain and bandwidth to be set per band.

Pairing

RCA and XLR outputs operate simultaneously, so one can feed a headphone amplifier while the other drives a power amp. In preamp mode the supplied remote controls volume, which lets the Centaurus connect straight to active monitors or a power amplifier, and a 12 V trigger switches linked equipment together with the DAC.

Alternatives

The TOPPING D90 III Discrete is another balanced desktop DAC in the range, listed at USD 999.