This is a review written by Terry Ellis March 2025.

For my video review please see my YouTube channel link here

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New flagship

One of the most talked about HiFi brands on YouTube is always Eversolo and lets face it their products have been very popular for offering a lot at a lower price competitively. However the new DMP-A10 does not have a lower price so how can that possibly still be the case, maybe it can. My review of the A10 is definitely not going to be all hype, there are a couple of things it does that I feel a little let down by and I will go hard on it for that given its high price. I do strongly believe in giving credit where credit is due, the Eversolo A10 has exceeded my expectations and is excellent in many important ways. It’s had me questioning can an all in one in type of digital music source be as good as more expensive separates? That is likely the most important question for anyone considering it.

All-in-one still the way to go?

I have always admired the concept of products like the Eversolo A10, one that is combining a digital music server and streamer with a DAC and preamplifier in the one chassis, where one really good app can control everything, incorporating many useful functions and features. Who doesn’t love that idea, but having a lot of features only works when they are all at the same high quality level. I think if your not satisfied with one thing that it does and you feel the need to use something else as a replacement the “all-in-one” concept is ruined. To date I haven’t really found myself being fully satisfied to my very high expectations with many similar products to this and using HiFi separates has always offered better sound quality or the right features for me.

I had that same doubtful mindset coming into this review and taking the A10 out of the box I wasn’t initially sure how I felt about its aesthetic design. I am currently more keen on silver HiFi components and the A10 is very black and quite understated. It has a bit of an amplifier feel to it with the on display heatsinks and that is a very different look for a digital source product like this. The build quality is very nice, it definitely feels big company sleek manufactured and not built in a shed by a guy name Bob as some expensive HiFi can. There are some interesting angles with nicely joined up curved sections to the casework, so its anything but just a rectangle box and I do appreciate that, it feels more modern.

It can’t be an Eversolo without a touch screen, the A10 has the new bigger 6.5inch screen that is clear and very responsive for a touch screen on a HiFi product. I don’t use touch screens because I hate finger prints and thankfully Eversolo have included an exceptionally nice remote control that has a very shiny rear, so finger prints and marks really easy, but it is a nice addition. I did use the remote at times and doing so makes the A10 work more like a traditional HiFi component so if you are an old school use the remote not the app audiophile you will dig this for sure. But really the “magic” of the Eversolo product experience comes from their fantastic app. The display can take on many different forms that we are used to from Eversolo, either information based, or various digital VU meters or spectrum type displays, so there is some individual customisation choices here and that will have appeal. Or you can just turn the screen fully off with the remote to go super stealthy and I can see that approach appealing to others.

One thing I did notice about this new screen is that it seems best when viewed from the front, I did notice some contrast shift from viewing the screen at an angle but I also think its to do with how light reflects off it too.  If you are upgrading from an A6 you might notice this a little at first but you wont care about it for very long I can promise you that.  We also have to talk about the second screen on the volume control which is no doubt excessive, but very nice whatever way you break it down.  I appreciate that you can customise how this screen looks too and its brightness with a number of options to choose between.  The volume wheel itself I like its action, it feels very well made and the action is extremely “clicky” internally. Its a very fast and responsive volume control that offers a huge range of volume adjustment ideal for those with very sensitive of speaker systems.

Round the back and inside

The rear of the A10 has a very impressive number of connections and likely something here for everyone. For analogue outputs the are both single ended and balanced with dual line level subwoofer outputs too. There are controls for setting up subwoofers within the app that could come in clutch for some people. There are three sets of analogue inputs including a balanced input and that makes me very happy. There are 6 digital inputs including HDMI with ARC and that will make a lot of other people very happy, as will the two different network inputs RJ45 and an SFP fibre input. Take note of the list of compatible SFP (not SFP+) modules listed on the Eversolo website, I missed this and bought some that were not compatible and wasted my money, do check the website so you don’t make the same mistake as me.

Then strangely in a way there are three digital outputs which means you could use the A10 purely as a digital music streamer and server to feed an external DAC and  different system. I can see some people liking this if they have a separate HiFi and home cinema system in the same room and maybe would want to use the same music source for both. Maybe the digital outputs are there for future proofing when better stuff comes along and “upgradeitis” kicks in. There is dual band WiFi and Bluetooth 5.0 support that requires you to fit some cool small aerials.

On the underside there is a quick access bay for a tool less installation of up to two NVME hard drives to use the A10 as a music server. I installed a cheap 1TB drive bought from Amazon that worked perfectly and I setup the A10 on my network using  Samba. This took me about an hour to get working but I could then send music files from my Mac across my network to the A10 and manage the library. I prefer to do it like that rather than using the A10’s screen or the app to do the library management but you can.

So this is all very impressive so far but what about the internals. Power supply snobs such as myself will be pleased to see dual pretty substantial toroidal transformer linear power supplies being used.  These deliver a a claimed stable below 30uVRMS power delivery which seems great but actually what grabbed my attention more was the use of large ELNA capacitors in the power filtering and voltage regulation. You also cannot miss the two whopping sized gold OCXO clocks that are custom to Eversolo and claim to have extremely low jitter and exceptional timing accuracy. They are some really big boy clocks compared to all the others I have seen before.

For the digital chops the A10 is running on an XMOS audio processor using an ESS Sabre 9039 Pro DAC chip and it uses a fully balanced analogue preamplifier with an R2R volume control.  The R2R explains the clicking when you change the volume. I must not forget to mention the electrical isolation system that is built in to  electrically isolate the digital from the analogue side of the A10 circuit and that is very cool. I am no engineer but can say I was impressed with everything I saw in the A10 for the overall layout, the separation of important circuits and the attention to details, its all very impressive.

App-solutely Fabulous

Now lets talk about the A10’s key features and the Eversolo control app experience because the two are linked and massively important to your everyday enjoyment. I think Eversolo’s biggest stand out strength is their excellent control app, its one of my favourites as its both efficient and elegant to use.

The app has been improved a lot since it was introduced a few years ago, even by adding the visually annoying at times home button that makes getting back to the main settings screen so much faster (since this review the home button has been moved to a less obvious but less annoying position).  The main home screen lay out is clear so you can see straight away pretty much everything you might want to do and where to click to do it. You can customise the home screen to make it more streamlined for you specifically and I appreciate that.

My recommendation is the first thing you do is familiarise yourself with the source page and select some very important settings such as the specific output you want to use. Out of the box it’s set to XLR/RCA for the analogue output so it will just work for you from either output. If you are using the balanced output selecting the BAL-XLR option will give you a clearer and better sound from my testing, I would expect this to be the same for selecting the specific RCA output too. Also pay attention to your analogue settings to select between the seven different DAC filter modes, these do make some difference. You also have other important controls here such as balance or how you want the volume to be adjusted (how many db per click) and even the XLR connection polarity. There is a great set of options and customisation here.

There are a number of display options for the main screens brightness and the choice of different VU meters or themes, all the different visual stuff it’s easy to access all of this in the app. I mentioned good controls for using subwoofers and what I appreciate here is being able to adjust the sub volume level, crossover and there is a delay control and these are really useful tools for dialling in a subwoofer, more for power users, but I do wish there were individual controls for each subwoofer output if you are using two, that would be much better.

For music streaming there is support for Tidal, Qobuz, Deezer, Amazon Music, Apple music as well Spotify connect, Apple Airplay, Tidal connect, its Roon ready with more too.  This level of streaming service support particularly including Apple music is another stand out USP for Eversolo products that I know many people do appreciate. I appreciate the streaming music app user experience for both Tidal and Qobuz. I find the Eversolo app is fantastic to use because its super fast and responsive. Now I am familiar with it I find its natural to use, it doesn’t feel awkward or too cumbersome to navigate around and find what I want. Whether I am exploring new music or listening to my favourite albums its all there and easy to access.

What I like most is the mixture of the visual experience, essentially the larger album art and how that is combined with all the necessary control and textual information, the layout of everything and the colour scheme, its all great to use from my phone. I do have a couple of criticisms,  the first being every time I visit my favourite albums I have to select how I want them to be organised. The next time I visit my favourites that choice has been reset and I have to make it again and that is very annoying. The second complaint is with the way the listening history is collected. I do like the fact that the last 5 albums you have listened to are stored and you can quickly access them again. However I prefer it when an app builds a play list from all the individual music tracks I have been listening to and that list stays constant and keeps getting added to until I clear it. This is how HiFi Rose, JPLAY and Blueos do it. Eversolo please add this as somehow.

For navigating my own music stored on the NVME hard drive the user experience is very similar to streaming. The album art is smaller for some reason but it’s a pretty snappy and good experience so I have no real complaints. One feature I didn’t really use much but seems like a great idea is the collection centre as its Eversolo’s way to try and bring all of your preferred selection of music libraries into one app section.  So bringing your local stored and streaming favourites into one app section to make it quicker to go between them selecting what you want. This is the right way to go but using it didn’t feel as mixed library well integrated compared to using a stand alone app like the JPLAY.  You can use the JPLAY app with the A10 as its been JPLAY certified so it could give a better experience and maybe be worth exploring with tis free 14 day trial.

DSP or not to DSP

Its important to mention the various DSP options on offer in the A10 as some could very useful features to help tune or improve the sound of the system in the room.  The A10 offers two very good equalisers including a parametric equaliser.  There is a delay control so you can adjust how your soundstage balance is from a timing point of view and this has a different effect to a traditional balance control that changes the volume. Timing is the equivalent of moving the speaker very small amounts forwards and backward and sometimes its hard to move heavy speakers a tiny amount,  slight timing adjustment might be what you need to to lock in your left to right imaging. I liked seeing this feature and its rare to see it, but I did not use it. There are some other useful tools as well.

Just remember you need to turn the DSP on for any input you want to use it for and pay attention to the DSP gain setting as that will lower the overall volume to create some digital system headroom. You might not need the headroom depending on what you are doing in the digital domain, eq and room correction need more than simply adjusting the delays. I suggest you adjust the DSP gain to suit your needs, closer to the 0 is likely best but if you hear distortion using any DSP function lower the gain until its gone.

Good price for what you get?

One big DSP function in the A10 is the room correction and I have a huge amount to say about this not all good but I am going to save it until the end of the review in case its not important to you.

The DMP- A10 costs £3590 which seems a lot of money for Eversolo because its about £3000 more than Eversolo’s A6 that does nearly all of the same things.  So with the higher price comes a much higher expectation for the sound quality, so does the A10 deliver that?

Sounded great right out of the box

The A10 is quite a difficult product to talk about for its own sound quality because its not that characterful. It sounds very clean without anything stand out negative for me to moan about, but with a lot that is positive for me to praise. There are some Eversolo sound characteristics that I am familiar with from the A6 but the A10 delivers a very high quality level of digital sound quality, one that is instantly and obviously better than the A6, its far more gratifying to listen to.

I started off my listening testing using the A10 with the big and very transparent sounding Esoteric S03 power amplifier driving my SVS Ultra Evolution Titan speakers and I was instantly impressed. The A10 seemed to have a very noise floor and that allowed for a very precise and clear three dimensional soundstage to happen in my room. Sound starting from well behind the speakers coming right out into the room, all with superb spatial positioning clarity. It was high end separates quality and I was not expecting it to be that good.

I was also impressed by how substantial and solid the overall sound was, it was not lacking in scale or bass or fullness or sound stage presence like I have experienced with some similar products.  Instead it was comparing very well to a more expensive separates system I was listening too and comparing against. The A10 sounded a little warmer than I was expecting from an Eversolo source, however I realised later it wasn’t sounding warm, it has a neutral sound but the details of the music were being presented with a nice mixture of soft crispness and not tense or hard or edgy. That was an obvious sign to me of very good digital sound.

Some hours later I was still sat listening to the system and I had been enjoying an excellent very much unplanned listening session, with the A10 at the heart of the system sounding this good straight out of the box. That never happens so this initial listening session was very telling, the A10 sounds excellent.  One major negative of a product like this is the lack of the ability to change things up, you can’t change the DAC or the preamp or the streamer to try and tune a different overall sound, its all locked in. That means the power amplifier you use with the A10 is going to be critical to the overall system sound balance.

Had to be this amplifier

I felt it was essential to also have an Eversolo F10 stereo power amplifier here for this review because they are designed to go together, and I don’t think you can fully assess one without the other as they complete each others picture. Listening to the A10 with the F10 is a different Eversolo sound to what I am used to and I think it might surprise a number of people the same as did me.

The A10 F10 combo sounds surprisingly very sweet and tonally full with a nice amount of warmth meaning vocals can sound very tonally pleasing, but with Eversolo like excellent clarity and timing. There is a nice and full bass that is tight and articulate but with a nice smooth rounded character.  Music transients or the leading edges of notes have again that nice mixture of soft crispness, meaning even less well polished music is enjoyable to listen to, its not hard or harsh even when it sometimes can be with other setups.  The A10, F10 sounds sweet.

I have been thinking about this a lot and how this might achieved and how much of this was due to the F10. I think it’s a combination of low noise and great timing in the A10 that is an easy one to work out but I think for the F10 power amp it must be under stressed so the amplifier is always cruising and that is why it has the sweeter sound character. Not many solid state power amps sound this sweet at around the £2000 price level.  I have really been enjoying the Eversolo duo driving the Audio Solutions Figaro M2 speakers. It’s been a great balanced sounding system and I listened to so much music on it, its been crazy.  I enjoyed the great balance of enjoyable easy listening but still dynamic and clear enough. However there is a but coming.

This type of presentation has 2 downsides.  The first is the more relaxed sound I found it to be a bit too play it safe mostly at lower volumes and the system didn’t really hit the full scale and dynamics and bass power I like until the volume was turned up. The second is the “sweetness” is always the same sweetness and it was present in all music so maybe there is not quite as much music variation as a setup that is more honest or”brutally” transparent amplifier. These are nit pick criticisms and totally user preference based of course because I can see many people loving these presentation aspects.

I also wanted to test the A10 with some other manufacturer power amplifiers as you might already own a power amp you love and want to put an A10 before it. Firstly I tested the NAD M23 as I thought it was a good class d amplifier example “middle ground.” I appreciated the NAD’s more agile and precise sound compared to the F10, creating more space in the music thanks to a crisper, cleaner leading edge and this was better with some classical music. I did find myself missing the smooth flow, bass fullness and the sweetness from the F10 and over the longer listening session I did prefer the A10 F10 combo. However it was very close and I enjoyed the M23 almost equally as much just with different pro’s and cons, showing the A10 could work well with a good class D amplifier.

I also tested the Galion TSA75 stereo power amplifier, it’s a different design of class a/b.  This amplifier was very interesting because the bass was bigger and more full and rounded compared to the other two and I liked this about the Galion. The treble was more stand out too with the Galion showing that both the Eversolo F10 and NAD M23 power amps sound a little dark in the treble, I think this worked a little better with the A10. It’s the same story, over the longer listening session I would find myself missing the overall music balance from the A10 F10 combo than with the Galion, but again it was very close. Despite being different I enjoyed them both but the Eversolo pairing had the edge.

All this amplifier testing showed to me that the A10 is flexible as a source for the power amp you use it with and it will let you hear the differences, pros and cons of any power amp you use. It wont get in their way and that is good to know. It also showed to me that I think there is an “edge” or a better synergy when you use both Eversolo products and we should expect that of course.

Preamplifier 

What about just using the preamplifier in the A10 by using its analogue inputs. That meant testing vinyl from an Origin Live turntable and Modwright PH9 XT phono stage. The first thing to point out here are the analogue input options because you can choose to digitise the analogue input or not.

Digitising will be necessary if you want to use any of the DSP options like the room correction. I didn’t want to do that so selected to pass through straight to the R2R preamplifier and that meant the signal stayed analogue all the way through. This option did sound noticeably better as you might expect. I did find myself being more greedy with the volume when listening to vinyl but the sound was excellent for its timing, the sound stage was all well defined and 3D sounding in the room, so I was happy spinning records through the A10.

If I had one criticism for the analogue input it would be, maybe the sound was a little play it safe and not that exciting until the volume was up very high, but records sounded excellent overall with the character of the NOS valves in the phono stage coming through.

Room Correction, is it?

Lastly to talk about is the Eversolo room correction feature that is part of the A10’s DSP suite. A feature like this I am sure will get many people excited as some might think it’s a magic button to amazing sound. It can be a fantastic tool but its never that so don’t expect that from any RC system. I have been using DSP in audio systems for more than 15 years and I have used Dirac Live for around 8 years and used it professionally to calibrate audio systems for different people all over the world. My comments are therefore coming from a position of a lot of experience but that means my expectations are very high. In my opinion Dirac Live sets the benchmark for what room correction needs to offer as a tool so I am looking for an equivalent from any solution that calls itself RC. How does Eversolo’s room correction compare to Dirac Live, it doesn’t, not at all sadly which is pretty disappointing.

What I do like is how Eversolo have made their RC “tool” super simple to use. You can do everything through the Eversolo app and you can choose to use your phones microphone to do the measurements.  Now just because you can doesn’t mean you should. Consider how much money you have in your system and you are going to drastically change its sound based on measurements taken with a phone, not a tool designed for that job.  Does that make sense to you, only you can decide that.

I recommend you get a dedicated measurement microphone like a miniDSP UMIK (1 or 2 both are great) or an Eversolo EM01 and also get yourself a microphone boom stand, these are cheap on Amazon and will make your life much easier.  The RC “work flow” is super simple and is done with one measurement and correction filter being applied in just a couple of minutes of work so that is good of course in a way.

There is a set of tools to select the correction behaviour you want to do including frequency limits, allowing you to go “old school” and only correct for bass below 200Hz like we did decades ago, its your choice. Where the biggest limitation of this system is for me is creating a target because that is fundamental to what you will hear. You can only have a flat curve or a BK curve, which is flat with a high frequency roll off and that is it.  A flat curve sounds ideal excuse the pun but the science if human hearing tells us something else so its not a desirable in room frequency response in my experience.

If you don’t want a flat cure and I have never ever wanted that sound in my room then what do you do? Following my video review it was pointed out to me that its possible to also use the A10’s parametric equaliser to make sound target adjustments and that might be fine for you to do.  Its not for me, I want to see the measurements and have a fully customisable sound target similar to what Dirac Live offers. Yes using Dirac does require more from the user, it requires a computer, it takes more time and more user input to get the best result but as a tool it allows you to fully control and customise the sound of the system.  That is essential to getting the best result.

Eversolo’s RC might still work well for you, it changes the sound a lot and you get what it tells you it will do. You may still like this implementation and maybe it will make your system sound better and that is fine and if so use it. I would never use it in its current application and I can see many not liking what it does either.

I know Eversolo are a great company for developing and improving things. So I hope they continue to improve their RC solution to hopefully offer a rival solution to Dirac Live in the future, or maybe just give us access to Dirac Live as that would make the A10 the “perfect product” of this kind and price level.

Final Thoughts

So this has been my longest review ever I think but the A10 is such a good product, doing so much it warranted it. I appreciate there are still some big holes in this review such as how does the A10 compare to the A8 or the A6 and is it worth the premium? I don’t have an A8 so I cannot comment on that comparison but is it thousands of pounds better than the A6? I believe so but each person will judge that for themself.

I think the important question here is does the A10 justify its high cost, and I think comparing it to similar / higher priced separates as I did proved to me it is. The separates system allows you to do more in terms of making changes and go much further with more money spent but the A10 gets you very close to separates in terms of sound quality, with the benefit of the simplicity, less boxes and the excellent app and features.

This is a no hype review, it’s a credit where credit is due review, the Eversolo DMP A10 deserves credit, it is EXCELLENT.

A Special Performer Award is Pursuit Perfect Systems highest accolade and is in recognition of exceptional product performance regardless of price

For the full specification of the Eversolo A10 see their website linked here