Digital to Digital Converters with Devialet - New products

[Pim]

The Holo Red Streamer / DCC is an interesting new device, with the potential to be a very fine companion for a Devialet Expert.

My rational for this is that my ears tell me that the Expert sounds best when fed with a decent quality signal via AES/EBU. My ears also tell me that the very best results can be achieved using HQPlayer as the source software. The Holo Red Streamer can do both. Plus it is relatively compact and affordable. On-line it is currently selling for £884 (with taxes) or $798.

In terms of objective performance, it has very low jitter and very low noise. Quite how is influences sound quality is debatable, but with key measurements this good at a relatively affordable price, what is not to like?

Plus, if you don't want to use HQPlayer, the Holo Red uses a pi CM4 module, so you could use it as a RAAT endpoint, or pretty much anything else, there are a lot of software options available for the pi.

GoldenSound measurements per the link below:

https://goldensound.audio/2023/02/09/hol...surements/

Interesting! If it had that optical ethernet converter that the Optical Rendu or ifi Neo Stream has, it could be even better. I wonder how it sounds as a DDC alone.

Also, I wonder how the best of these DDCs sound compared to something like the Grimm MU1.

I would have thought that some of these latest DCCs should sound every bit as good as something like the Grimm MU1. Jitter and noise measurements are so good that it is difficult so rationalise how anything better could provide an audible improvement. The other variable is software, but with things like HQPlayer, Audivana and others available, there seems little scope for improvement here either. The MU1 is a lot more money also, for whatever improvement it might be able to make.

So those are my rational thoughts. Although I have never heard an MU1, and for some reason rational thoughts do not always apply to audio, so who knows!

@Vivialet - It is indeed very red. Although I guess it is small emough that you could hide it away somewhere if red is an issue. For sure, it is not an obvious match aesthetically for a Devialet, or a match for much else for that matter.

I have had one on home loan and put an order in for one. I have only been able to compare with a Cary Audio streamer and it easily beat that. That's with the RED over AES/EBU and the Cary over SPDIF.