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.