Audiophilepure

https://www.stereophile.com/content/ta-symphonia-streaming-receiver

Herford, T+A’s home town, is close to Hamelin, the place immortalized in the fairy tale of the Pied Piper, whose music was literally impossible to resist. That’s fitting. With its crisp dynamics, taut, brawny bass, and feather-light treble detail, the Symphonia drew me in, unfailingly. It delivers way more audiophile gravitas than its size suggests. Although it lacks the excellent built-in CD player and the balanced connections of the bigger R 2500 R, the Symphonia is just as powerful and leaves surprisingly little on the table. It’s a miniature Meisterstück that should make the shortlist for Stereophile‘s Component of the Year

Footnote 1: Well, almost. This coinage comes from a droll little lexicon called Schottenfreude, by Ben Schott, in which the author proposes clever neologisms for phenomena that Germans should have a word for but don’t. The immodest length of the imagined compound words is part of what makes them funny—but of course the expanse of letters is also a feature (or a bug) of actual German. As Mark Twain wrote in “The Awful German Language,” from A Tramp Abroad: “These things are not words, they are alphabetical processions.”

https://www.audiophilia.com/reviews/2025/9/24/roon-nucleus-one

The best compliment I can give about the Roon Nucleus One (USD 499.99) is that it’s like my morning coffee—I start my day with it, find it comforting to take it with me anywhere, and it really gives me a boost in my music playing throughout the day. Not only do I recommend it, I think it should be purchased even before other needed components, at least that’s what I’m telling my friends. It really is that important in your setup, especially ease of use. It’s not essential to have one to enjoy the Roon experience, but every update, every moment you want to access Roon, it’s the best way to do it. For me, a must-have component. Very highly recommended. 

Such performance underscores how critical the DAC is in the signal chain. Regardless of how refined the amplification or loudspeakers may be, a compromised converter upstream will veil information and restrict dynamics. The D900 demonstrates the opposite effect: by keeping distortion and noise below audibility, it allows every subsequent stage to work at its best. Listeners may find familiar recordings yielding new levels of intimacy and realism, not because of any editorial “voicing,” but because the DAC is stepping out of the way and letting the source material speak for itself.

For those who still question whether digital playback has reached maturity, the D900 offers a persuasive answer. Topping has combined superb engineering discipline with innovative decoding technology, and the result is a converter that competes with units costing several times as much. The D900’s fine detail retrieval is spectacular, its noise performance exemplary, and its overall contribution to system fidelity impossible to overstate. As the essential bridge between digital media and the analog world, we hear, the DAC deserves as much attention as any amplifier or transducer. With the D900, Topping has proven that this attention can pay extraordinary dividends.