Blue LED's and tiny T-Amps. What's going on in that Rochdale?!
If you're referring to my comment, I meant Lepai & the others one can (could?) buy for something like $12 to $15, with body made from aluminum heatsink and with horrible insides. That was a few years ago, though, they might have improved the manufacturing process in the meantime.I can't find any suggestion of unreliability for the Topping TP20. I googled it with 'fault', 'problems', failure' etc before hooking it up to the (rather expensive, rare and collectable) Tannoys and can't find anyone stating they've lost speakers etc with them, even folk driving them hard into small inefficient speakers. It's hard to find anything other than positive comments. Apparently all the T-Amps are very easy to kill if you accidentally short them out, but that goes for a lot of amps. Is there any logical / technical reason they'd fail in a dangerous manner in normal use? There's no switch-on / off pop or thump either which I guess means there's not a lot of DC offset floating about. It's a very quiet little amp as it doesn't hiss or hum either.
How does the 2020 differ from the 2021B I bought this summer?
The quality of the output inductors is supposed to be important. I've had a TP20 mkII and Arjen 2020 plus briefly tried a couple of other 2020s. I also have Temple Audio Bantam Gold and Monos here at the moment. The 2020s all have one trait in common I find. There's a slightly tizzy quality to sibilance on recordings where sibilance is not well controlled. On "normal" sibilance it's not really an issue. The Arjen has a really fabulous sound but it's so open sounding that this tizziness is too excessive for me. The Arjen is bought unboxed btw, it's simply a populated pcb. The Temple Audio products are way smoother, especially when run from SLA battery, if there's any tizz there it's very marginal.
I found the tizz was still there with SLA for the Topping and Arjen. I haven't tried the KingRex, it's on my list.Have you tried the KingRex T20? They pretty much wrote the book on implementing this chip before those Johnny Come Latelys came on the scene. They were also the first to match SLA power to it: sparkle, yes, but the tizz isn't inherent (or shouldn't be). Definitely a side-effect of the PSU to which they are super-sensitive. Fragile little critturs Tripaths are, but worth nurturing!