This is a review and detailed measurements of the xDuoo XA-10 combination DAC, Headphone Amplifier and Bluetooth receiver. It was kindly sent to me by one of their sellers, Shenzhenaudio audio. It costs US $479 from their store. The XA-10 breaks the mold for desktop DACs with one attractive industrial design:
The rotary controller feels nice and overall look is super nice to look at. Alas, there are some usability issues. The fonts are rather small and when you have your hand on the rotary control, you could be blocking the display. The is a small issue compared to lack of acceleration on the rotary control. I estimated that you need to make 7 full rotations of the control to go from lowest to highest volume! Normal rotations left and right barely change the sound level. This is deadly in a playlist when one track may all of a sudden be much louder. It could be many seconds before you can turn the level low enough. It was actually faster to take my headphones off than getting the volume down. I was surprised that there were balanced headphone outputs on the front, but only unbalanced pre-out:
I also could not control the level of pre-out. Maybe there is a way but I could not find it in the simple menu provided which only changed the gain and filter settings. As you see a beefy laptop style, 36 watt power supply is provided. I had wished that in this size enclosure, the power supply was internal. But let me be very clear: it was love at first sight when it comes to overall look of the unit. xDuoo XA-10 Measurements (DAC) I used USB input and RCA rear jacks to test the DAC subsystem. I must say, I was not at all prepared for the poor performance that I saw in my dashboard:
Company advertises THD+N of 0.0008% which translates into a SINAD of 101 dB. We are not even close to that at 89. Even if we were, that is way poor compared to devices that XA-10 competes with.
A volume control chip from TI is used to assure channel balance which I suspect is partly the reason for much reduced performance than what the DAC chip alone could get. Signal to noise ratio was better but still not competitive:
I thought maybe it would do better at lower voltages but that is hardly so:
Jitter measurements showed rather elevated noise level which hides artifacts (which are still present but inaudible):
IMD distortion showed early rise in such:
Linearity was perfect (this test excludes noise):
As usual, I tried to measure the different filters provided bus strangely all of them measured the same:
This is a slow filter and unfortunate to be the only one working. Clearly this is a firmware bug. Multitone test showed the problems we already know about:
The reduced max level of this test allows performance to be better than the dashboard but still not remotely what we like to see in a desktop DAC. xDuoo XA-10 Headphone Amplifier Test A test of output at 50 mv showed that this output also suffers from too high of a noise level:
So be careful about using sensitive IEMs which ironically the reason to use the volume control IC (to have good channel matching). We do have healthy amount of power with 300 ohm load:
Noise and distortion levels are not competitive however. Same is true of 32 ohm load:
Strangely, there is hardly any benefit to high gain mode. It raises noise floor but gives you no more power. Something is strange there as there. Switching to balanced we get double the power at 300 ohm:
But not with 32 ohm load:
Current must be the limiting factor here. xDuoo XA-10 Headphone Listening Tests No surprise that the good amount of power provided has no trouble driving either my Drop Ether CX headphone, or Sennheiser HD-650. Alas, I could not do my usual testing where I blast the volume to near max for a second or so to see if the amp distorts. As noted in the intro, the volume control is so slow that by the time I would get any volume, my ears were suffering and I had to back down. So I don't know how well XA-10 would behave driving more difficult loads than I had. Or how distorted it gets at the limit. Conclusions Ah, what a missed opportunity! Nice design/looks damaged by usability, performance and potential bugs. I had such high hopes for the XA-10 but at the end, it was a real let down. Hopefully they can spin a version 2 that does justice to the form factor. For now, the design choices such as digital volume control, "class A" discrete amp, etc. is coming to hound this unit. It is with some sadness that I cannot recommend the xDuoo XA-10. Subjective performance is likely fine but there are other choices where you get that, plus excellent objective results and no usability issues. ---- As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome. Appreciate any donations using: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/ |
