My 2019 Update Thread - My final system I think.

[Jimbo]

Exciting times Gary, these boxes are coming thick and fast!

Looks like a piece of hifi jewelry and I am sure it will be an interesting piece of kit. Hope it moves the system up another notch.

Look forward to your thoughts soon.

[Ali Tait]

Nice! Have you won the lottery?

[Gazjam]

Nice! Have you won the lottery?

You just never know...

[Ali Tait]

Should be a great sounding digital source mate.

[Gazjam]

Cant wait to hear it Ali.

By all measured and A/B Blind tested accounts, its not half bad!

Designed to work well with Holo Audio dacs, (with their mega high upsampling rates) it should be great.
Almost pulled the plug on a HifiRose RS130, great bit of gear, but like the Topping Pre90 I bought instead of the Holo Audio Serene Preamp ... I wanted to be sensible and see if this got me there first.

Been a tight paypoke this month, so need to be kinda sensible.
Thats what happens when you go "bull in a chinashop" with hifi.
I'm ok with ny decisions, suits me at this point in time.

If the new Pre or the Streamer sound offensive, its back to Plan A, will get the first ones I thought of.
But as with all things Hifi, best to hear them first if you can.

SPOILER: Initially they both sound outstanding, lets see what the next few weeks brings…

[Ali Tait]

Don't think you'll be disappointed mate, that's some nice kit.

[Ali Tait]

Don't think you'll be disappointed mate, that's some nice kit.

[CageyH]

SPOILER: Initially they both sound outstanding, lets see what the next few weeks brings…

I keep looking at replacing the Pre90 in my system, but the problem is that it works well, and what do you replace it with for sensible money?

[Gazjam]

I keep looking at replacing the Pre90 in my system, but the problem is that it works well, and what do you replace it with for sensible money?

I know… right?
It’s as close to transparent as possible, and if it works well with your power amp then where to go?

[Gazjam]

Had some more time with the Holo Red replacing the Oppo 203 as a Roon Endpoint now.
From the start it’s WAY better sounding playing from Roon than the Oppo, the difference is obvious.

The Oppo was limited to it what it could output, particularly unable to play native DSd from Roon, the Holo Red can play everything at insane upsampled bitrates.



Hooked it up with both USB and i2s, to let me flip between them, see which one sounds best to me?
Opinion seems to be divided, so hearing for myself.

Way too early to tell, that’ll come with time.

The USB implementation bypasses the May Dacs PLL, allows higher bitrates and uses the Dac as the master clock.
The i2s goes through the PLL and uses the Streamers clock.
Its a case of seeing which one works the best.

With everything still new I’m a long time away from drilling down that deep, just letting music play for a while get some time on both the Dac and Streamer.

No display on the Holo Red, only a status LED.
All settings accessed from its WebUI, just punch in its IP address and you access the SD card preinstalled control software.
Its Linux based, so you can install whatever flavour you prefer, but I’m sticking with the stock RedOS software.

Lets you toggle on and off the different services the box can do:

Roon Endpoint
HQPlayer NAA
UPnP
Airplay 2
Squeezelite
Scream
Spotify Connect
Tidal Connect



Nice to have the options,
but I’ll be using the box mainly a Roon Endpoint, playing local music and streamed through Qobuz.

The Holo Red shows up as an endpoint in Roon no problem, cool.



In the settings,
There’s a “Perfomance Mode” setting you can toggle on and off, which limits you to only having one option available.
As I’m just using Roon I’ll switch that on at a later point, just want to get a feel for how it sounds once it properly starts doing its thing.