HOLO Audio MAY DAC

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Got my Holo Audio May DAC yesterday. It’s getting more than 16 hours of burn-in time so far. 

 

Should I let it burn-in continuously for the recommended 500 hours or switch it off from time to time? The May runs hotter than I expected so I’m a bit nervous if it should be burned in continuously.

 

 

 

 

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I have this burn-in track from HDTrack that just goes from 20Hz to 20kHz.  I play it in an infinite loop. I used that to burn-in my speakers. Now, I'm wondering if that's NOT the best way to burn-in a DAC.  What do you guys play to burn in the May? 

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3 hours ago, Diavolo said:

I just play really good and varied music. I enjoy the ride. 

 

https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=1EoZ5oQwIxReGqARxl-p6gFZdTibaDCEp

Thanks Diavolo, I’ll switch over to variety of music for my overnight burn in.

 

I am definitely in love with this DAC. PRaT is very good and natural. Bass is round, weighty without sounding too warm. Vocal is textured. Some recordings now sound too grainy but vocals in good recording sound amazing, smooth and with this wetness in the air. 
 

I am only using Audirvana on my old MacBook Pro to play TIDAL. MQA tracks sound grainy after Audirvana’s first unfold. Non-MQA track sounds smoother. 

 

 

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1 hour ago, Diavolo said:

I'm not a fan of MQA for technical reasons related it to it not being a lossless codec, however I do allow Roon to do the first unfold and I'm not noticing any grain with my setup, but I'll turn off the MQA decoder and go straight NOS to see if I prefer the sound more. It should be as good as 16/44 redbook all things being equal.  

My understanding is that the 16/44 before any unfold is not the same as the 16/44 you get from red book due to compression. Not saying that I can hear the difference in the lossy compression. 😅

 

I don’t have access to qobuz in Canada. What I read online is that the same track in TIDAL usually sounds thinner when compared to Qobuz. When I compare my flac files purchased from ProStudoMaster.com, TIDAL sounds thinner. That’s my subjective impression and I don’t have a large library to compare with more variety of tracks in TIDAL.

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9 hours ago, GoldenOne said:

Just wanted to post re: the drivers issue

Looks like kitsune has updated their driver/firmware download page now: https://www.kitsunehifi.com/product/holo-audio-may-dac/#tab-downloads-links

Driver v5.0 is out, and also its got the 3012/3014 firmwares in there. It confirms that the same firmware is used for spring 2 and may which is good.

Also, for @Flextreme it says in the .txt file in the driver folder that apparently 3014 has been the "stock" driver since late 2020, but that they recommend you upgrade to 3012 if your USB chipset is compatible. So that explains why you couldn't use 1.536mhz stock.

@GoldenOne do you know if firmware 3012 is compatible with old MacBook? Other than support for 1.536MHz, does the lower sampling rates sound better with 3012 firmware?

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@GoldenOne, thank you for the detailed explanation on MQA. I appreciate you taking the time to shed some light on this confusing and seemingly protected MQA practice. It confirms what I heard. Perhaps MQA stands for Mob Quatrol Assurance. 😆

 

Now if anyone knows how Canadian can sign up for Qobuz, please help a brother out.

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2 hours ago, Diavolo said:

Use a VPN service obviously with USA based servers to pretend you're in America.  You'll need it on anytime you're streaming music as well. 

 

I was hoping that I only need VPN to signup and not during streaming... 😔

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Given how robust the May’s USB interface is in handling jitter and how clean it sounds now, has anyone done any A/B hearing between feeding the May from a MacBook or Mac Mini with Audirvana (or a windows laptop) vs a dedicated music streamer like Lumin/Innuos/Aurelic?

 

I have no idea if my next step to get a dedicated streamer will result in any discernible improvement in SQ.

 

Any advice would be greatly appreciated. 

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9 minutes ago, GoldenOne said:

I've got an SMS200 Ultra which gives a sliiiiight improvement.
On other dacs its much more noticeable. But on the may honestly I wouldn't worry unless you're using a beefy gaming PC or something (in which case I'd want to isolate from it just in case cause of how electrically noisy they are :P, hell my main PC when the GPU is active the noise floor of my speakers (connected to my 2nd DAC which is connected to PC via USB) is audible whereas when pc is idle its not.

Thanks @GoldenOne! I’m currently connecting my May DAC to an integrated tube amp (Icon Audio Stereo 60 MkIII). So I’m not taking advantage of the fully balanced dual mono feature of the May. My plan was to get a Hegel amp to drive a pair of Magnepan. I’ve always wanted to get Magnepan at some point in my life. If a streamer has diminishing return in SQ, it’d be more fun to invest in Magnepan. I think May and Magnepan would be a match made in heaven. 

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The USB input on the May is very good but I’m thinking about getting a Bluesound Node2i as a streamer. Mostly because I want to get bit perfect streaming from Amazon Music HD. No Qobuz in Canada. I’m willing to try Amazon.

 

But the Node2i doesn’t have USB output. The only digital output is coaxial. How good is the May’s coaxial input? Would I get any drop in SQ compared to USB. I ask because I don’t have any experience in coaxial and I have no source equipment with coaxial output. 
 

Thank you in advance for sharing your experience. 

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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. 😓

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9 hours ago, ted_b said:

Lightwave, how powerful is your cpu?  What is the model?

 

@ted_b I tried an old MacBook Pro 13" i5. Too slow for ASDM5EC modulation. I also have a newer MacBook Pro with quad-core i7 2.9GHz.  Haven't tried that yet because it only has USB-C...

 

Will Xeon processor be better? I have an old Mac Pro (the trashcan Mac) 6-core Xeon E5 3.5GHz.

 

7 hours ago, ThenewGearPPK said:

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.

 

 

What is taps? How does the # of taps affect the upsampling?

 

And is there filters that I should avoid using for R2R DAC like the May?  I see ASDM5 (which is the default for SDM/DSD is delta-sigma modulator. Is that less "compatible" with R2R DAC?  Pardon my silly question... I'm still learning.

 

57 minutes ago, Miska said:

 

Since May can do high PCM rates, LNS15, NS9 and NS5 are suitable options for it.

 

 

@Miska Which NS/Dither would be appropriate for DSD on the May?

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44 minutes ago, Miska said:

 

May is like two DACs in one box. It has great SDM/DSD section too. I always run my Spring 1 and Spring 2 in DSD mode, at DSD256 using ASDM7EC modulator.

 

So you can run it at maximum PCM rate possible, or DSD256.

 

But note that with DSD the output level is half (6 dB) lower compared to PCM mode. This is normal and due to technical reasons. Just something to take into account if you want to compare the two sides.

 

 

@Miska Thank you for your help! A couple more questions if you don't mind. What's the difference between 32k x512, 44.1k x512 and 48k x512 bit rate limit? My guess is that if I use 48k x512 as the bit rate limit, 44.1k PCM source should be resampled to 44.k x512 DSD, right? So, for the May DAC, I should set it to 48k x512 (or 48k x256 if I want a lower bit rate)?

 

Since DSD has half output level, should I set the Vol Min to -6db and Vol Max to -3db?  I'm connecting the Mac to a pre-amp. (Not directly to a power amp like many do.)

 

Thanks again for everyone here for being so patient with newbies like me.

 

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This may or may not be a May DAC related issue. My apology if this is specific to the HQPlayer NAA.

 

@Miska Does HQPlayer NAA only support PCM?  I have one Mac running HQPlayer Desktop and the other running networkaudiod NAA, but all DSD got converted to PCM before streaming to the NAA node. It seems like that HQPlayer Desktop only see the networkaudiod node as a PCM device. And the console output of networkaudiod seems to suggest that CoreAudio can only see the May DAC as a PCM device. Will a Rasperry Pi running Linux with a proper USB driver be able to see the May DAC as DSD device?

 

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50 minutes ago, Miska said:

 

Do you have some specific reason to use such a NAA here instead of direct USB connection?

 

 

Well... everyone said it sounds better if the processing of resample happens on a computer that's far far away from the DAC (which kind of make sense intuitively to me). Another reason is that I want to run the resampling on a more powerful Mac that I also use as my work computer and so it can't be tethered to the DAC.

 

Another I observed is that the bit depth set to 16-bit when streamed to the NAA. Is this a CoreAudio issue?  I've set the bit to 20 but it still got converted down to 16-bit when streaming to NAA.

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4 minutes ago, Miska said:

 

Ahh, yeah, could be that CoreAudio driver has changed a little if you have Big Sur. That would explain why DoP is not working, it needs 24-bit (DAC Bits set to 20 doesn't affect this).

 

 

The Mac running networkaudiod NAA is Catalina, not Big Sur. The Mac running HQPlayer Desktop is Big Sur. If I get a Sonore microRendu or Raspberry Pi 4 as NAA, would I get the 16-bit problem?

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8 minutes ago, Miska said:

 

You can try with RasPi4 NAA for starters, it is pretty inexpensive and you can boot my OS image on so it is very straightforward to setup. You just write the image on microSD and boot it up. Unless this is some USB firmware feature in your device...

 

But in order to enable full capabilities of May, you need Intel based NAA. Assuming it has the USB firmware allowing 1.5M PCM and DSD1024.

 

 

Do you have a list of known RasPi4 NAA that are known to work with the full capabilities of May? Not sure how to go about finding out if the USB firmware on a RasPi4 is compatible.

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15 hours ago, damascato said:

What's the best digital connection I can use with the May? AES? i2s? 
 

@GoldenOne in his review says that it has great jitter correction via USB. Does it mean that the USB from a Pi4 would do for a good quality connection?

What's the best solution for a not overly expensive streamer?

Yes the May has a fanatical USB connection. So far I haven’t had any jitter issue. I’m running Roon. So I just use a cheap RasPi4b running ropieee.