HOLO Audio MAY DAC

[ThenewGearPPK]

On 11/26/2020 at 12:12 PM, Diavolo said:

I prefer HQP @ PCM 20bit/1.536mhz. I was very happy with Roon's upsampling which is limited to 768khz and honestly I swore I would never buy hqplayer because I was a naysayer, but I decided to play with it for a few weeks and I really enjoy the sound and prefer it to DSD512.  I feel DSD512 is very good, but maybe a touch less detailed or maybe a tad smoother sounding to me.  It could be all in my head, but I prefer PCM for whatever reason.

I've owned mostly Benchmark dacs source direct to various SET Tube amps, Matrix XSabre Pro MQA was my last dac (very best sabre dac I've owned) and I did use an Ayon Audio Stealth Tube DAC/preamp for a year (too colored, but pleasant sounding), but I have heard esoteric, dcs, Aurelic, Berkley, and other sabre chip dacs.  My friend recently bought the May KTE DAC and he was using the Berkley that he's now selling.

 

I've always wanted an R2R dac that had excellent measurements and was really excited when I found the May KTE DAC. I appreciate it's superb engineering and it's natural sound along with its incredible harmonics, beautiful midrange, timbre, detail, and holographic realism with regard to image separation, depth, layering, and palpability (ugh, I can't believe I used that word, lol). It's worth twice it's price in my honest opinion. 

 

How's the May vs the Matrix XSabre Pro?

[ThenewGearPPK]

2 hours ago, Lightwave said:

I'm overwhelmed with the HQPlayer4's settings. Can someone help a May DAC brother out? I want to get a couple set of settings to see what I've been missing from the HQPlayer's awesomeness I've been hearing so much about.

 

I gathered that I should set the DAC bits to 20-bit. What should I use for Filter 1x (Oversampling 1x), Filter Nx (Oversampling Nx), Dither, Modulator, Sample rate(/ Limit) and Bit rate (/ Limit) for PCM and SDM respectively.

 

I'll admit that I'm at a loss when I read the PDF manual. 😓

 

I actually went through the manual again to re-orientate myself with it.

Basically the filters to use for PCM are:

 

Closed Form - High # of taps

Closed Form-M - 1 million taps

Closed Form 16m - 16 million taps

Sinc-M - 1 million taps. High attenuation

Sinc-L - 131,070 taps x your conversion rate. Average attenuation.

 

For dither, almost all the options are for specific sample rates. i.e. NS4 is for 88.2kHz & LNS15 is for 768kHz etc..

TPDF is the standard for all type.

Gauss1 is a high quality dither that should be used for sample rates below 96kHz.

 

 

NOT sure what the difference between Filter 1x & Filter NX is? I just use the same filters on both of them.

 

[ThenewGearPPK]

On 3/24/2021 at 10:36 PM, Extreme_Boky said:

 

. The interconnects and speaker cables are pure annealed silver ribbons and the silver alloy ribbons – respectively. I also use solid core power cables exclusively, a combination of pure copper, pure silver or a combination of copper – silver plated and then gold plated….This is my fine-tuning approach to achieve the most natural sound. The speakers are Dynaudio. The USB cable is Audioquest Coffee (I think it’s Coffee...).

 

 

What's the name of those cables?

[ThenewGearPPK]

Does anyone have any problems getting PCM 1.536MHZ to run on May KTE with HQPlayer via direct USB?

 

Every time I select 1.536, the May just detects 705.6k instead & won't go higher.

Even jRiver can get it to recognize up to 786k, but not on HQplayer.

Is this a bug or is this fixable? A PC problem, USB port problem, driver problem?

 

The USB driver info shows version 5.00 & the May as revision v30.14.

 

[ThenewGearPPK]

Thanks, I am on a AMD chipset so that would be it.

 

BTW how would I downgrade to 30.12?

Do I just run the holousbaudioDfu.exe file in the driver folder or do I have to uninstall something first?

[ThenewGearPPK]

Well this sucks, I tried downgrading to 30.12 & now it won't play on any music player.

 

I completly uninstalled all the drivers & reinstalled the USB driver & still the same thing. I even restarted my PC a few times! Nothing plays. When I select any option in the audio output in JRiver, it will either say "Playback could not be started using the ASIO" or It will show as the song is being run with WASAPI output, but absolutely no music will play.

 

What happened?

 

EDIT:

I re-flashed to 30.14 firmware & now everything works.
 But why absolutely no music with 30.12?

 

[ThenewGearPPK]

35 minutes ago, Roasty said:

 

Both are excellent.

May KTE is a new addition and still being run in.

So far, am preferring the Rockna by a small margin. 

 

Try to upsample with the May to 768k with your software music player.

 

[ThenewGearPPK]

Can't upgrade to the new firmware, did all the instructionsWhat am I doing wrong? I updated the latest 5.27 driver.

Then I moved all the files in the new firmware update folder to programfiles/holoaudio/USB Audio Device Driver/W10_x64/  folder

Then I ran the file "holousbaudioDfu.exe"

It  then says no new firmware found.