TOPPING D90 III Sabre DAC Audioscience Review

TOPPING D90 III Sabre DAC Audioscience Review

This is a review and detailed measurements of the TOPPING D90 III Sabre balanced stereo DAC. It was sent to me by the company and costs 899.

As you can see, the design is what we have know about most of the Topping products. I do wish at this price that we had a high resolution display that showed VU meters and such. Usability would be better that way although the included remote is easy to use. Back panel is as you would expect:

Topping D90 III Balanced Stereo DAC USB Sabre Review.jpg

Nice to see Topping continuing to provide trigger support for automatic turn on of the downstream amplifiers and such.

TOPPING D90 III Sabre Measurements
The DAC has two output setting modes. One that provides max of 5 volts nominal and one that is 4 volts. For fairness I tested using the latter. DAC was allowed to warm up which improved its performance by about 1 dB.

As usual, we start with our dashboard:

Topping D90 III Balanced Stereo DAC XLR Measurement.png

This is the best performance we have seen from Topping and is in a virtual tie with the previous king of DAC SINAD measurements:

best stereo dac review balanced 2024.png

RCA performance is still superb and fully transparent:

Topping D90 III Balanced Stereo DAC RCA Measurement.png

Dynamic range is exceptional as you would imagine as it is setting the SINAD:

Topping D90 III Balanced Stereo DAC DNR Measurement.png

Multitone shows the exceptionally low distortion:

Topping D90 III Balanced Stereo DAC XLR Multitone Measurement.png

As does 50 Hz response for compatibility with other sites using it:

Topping D90 III Balanced Stereo DAC 50 Hz stereophile Measurement.png

Jitter could be a hair better given the performance elsewhere:

Topping D90 III Balanced Stereo DAC Jitter Measurement.png

IMD performance is excellent:

Topping D90 III Balanced Stereo DAC XLR IMD Measurement.png

Linearity is perfect:

Topping D90 III Balanced Stereo DAC Linearity Measurement.png

We have the typical filters but I would stay with default (F3):

Topping D90 III Balanced Stereo DAC XLR Filter Measurement.png

 

Topping D90 III Balanced Stereo DAC XLR Filter Frequency Response Measurement.png

The filter selection impacts wideband THD+N measurements so I stayed with the default:

Topping D90 III Balanced Stereo DAC XLR THD vs Frequency Measurement.png

Story is told….

Conclusions
Topping aimed to capture the top spot in the rankings and it got there, besting every other DAC it has produced, albeit with very small margin. If the cost is not a concern and you are buying a new DAC, might as well opt for D90 III.

I am happy to recommend the TOPPING D90 III Sabre.

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