[hifimckinney]

Any proud owner in or around Dallas area?

 

[Tboooe]

 
I took delivery of mine (level 3) yesterday and it is warming up/burning in as I am typing this....
I just wanted to take the time to second Joeybgood's experience dealing with Tim at Kitsune, I too took a punt on the new unreviewed Holo Spring 3 dac and to say that I am over the moon in this early stage is an understatement! There will be more to follow.
 

Looking forward to your impressions of this DAC.  Are you able to directly compare this DAC to another one?  It would be good to know details about your system.
 
i must say I am really thinking of taking a flyer and buying this DAC. I just need to save a few more pennies.  I was going to get a second sub but this DAC has got me very intrigued and excited!

 

[greenkiwi]

  Any proud owner in or around Dallas area?

Any in the San Francisco area?

 

[Tboooe]

  Any in the San Francisco area?

While we are at it...how about Orange County???  Pipe dream I know....

 

[ufospls2]

 
 
the newest dac in the works is the "May" dac and will be priced in the range of 3-4K and be even higher spec than the Spring Dac.
 

 

Hi bimmer100,
 
is there a release date for the "May" DAC? Or is it in the very early stages of design? 

 

[bimmer100]

Hi bimmer100,

is there a release date for the "May" DAC? Or is it in the very early stages of design? 

The release date is......
In the future.


Actually it's in its early stages and on the drawing board. I can't really share any details right now other than projected retail price is 3-4K and possibly more depending on silver prices. The hike happened today from many suppliers. which is a bad bad thing for the spring. Our transformer cost will be very expensive soon.
But we will try to remain aggressive in keeping our price as low as possible still

 

[wildsam]

I was wondering if any owners have sucessfully played dsd via jriver with the asio driver?
It is not working for me, wasapi and kernel streaming dsd playback works but only via DOP not native.
Otherwise the dac is sounding quite nice in my system.

 

[bimmer100]

I was wondering if any owners have sucessfully played dsd via jriver with the asio driver?

It is not working for me, wasapi and kernel streaming dsd playback works but only via DOP not native.
Otherwise the dac is sounding quite nice in my system.

Sorry, but are you a customer of ours?

Anyhow, as holo audio USA ... I will say that our windows 10 driver is coming out mid October with official signed drivers. For now there is evaluation driver you can download from us to allow full dsd native. Otherwise.. NO you can't

But he eval drivers has random beeps one in a while to remind you its eval.

We did get approval for our driver, and it was thousands of dollars. But we move at the pace of Microsoft.

A previous post would have mentioned this

 

[rocky500]

  I was wondering if any owners have sucessfully played dsd via jriver with the asio driver?
It is not working for me, wasapi and kernel streaming dsd playback works but only via DOP not native.
Otherwise the dac is sounding quite nice in my system.

 
Have you ever tried Snakeoil OS?
I am about to put in on a SSD drive to play around with.
It is a linux based OS but should support native DSD and designed for the purpose of great Audio reproduction.
All done by a local in Perth who is always willing to help.

 

[wildsam]

Hi Bimmer and Rocky,
I have a kind friend who loaned me his unit for a demo

Its running latest firmware and driver, I'm using latest Jriver on windows server r2.
Now I understand that the firmware and software is still under development.
I have a dual boot Snakeoil / Windows Server setup, will try Snakeoil and report back with the results.
Cheers lads

 

[bimmer100]

Hi Bimmer and Rocky,
I have a kind friend who loaned me his unit for a demo
Its running latest firmware and driver, I'm using latest Jriver on windows server r2.
Now I understand that the firmware and software is still under development.
I have a dual boot Snakeoil / Windows Server setup, will try Snakeoil and report back with the results.
Cheers lads

So you got the latest firmware and drive from us...
As I don't believe anyone has it posted, not even holo audio's own site or Taobao sellers.

 

[wildsam]

Not sure where my friend ordered it, probably from you....
Fear not, if I decide to buy one I will order it from you!
I own 2 other dsd capable dacs and I much prefer to use the asio drivers as it sounds best to my ears.

 

[bimmer100]

@bimmer100 I did not want to quote your entire post, but that was very helpful. May I suggest putting the information about the tuning and the collaboration with Jeff prominently on your website? I am very interested in this DAC and information like that helps a lot since there are far too many people in this field that make claims about everything under sun making improvements about the sound.

Knowing that the design engineer would have opted for the upgrades, if not for cost considerations, heavily tilts my opinion on the matter. Of course hearing it will be the ultimate test.

When you make demo units available for folks on this thread, I would ask to be amongst them. I'm currently looking for an excellent DAC to complete my signal chain. It'll be paired as follows:

FLAC from PC--> Schiit Wyrd--> Spring --> Cavalli Liquid Gold--> Focal Utopia

I look forward to more impressions and reviews and thank you for the detailed response.

 
 
here is an email Jeff Sent to me as a statement he wants to be known.
 
"I have tried silver o-type transformer when designing Spring. It's better than the 7N OFC of cause, but for cost reason I choose the 7N OFC o-type transformer as standard configuration.
The Jensen cap is an official option, not mod. For the fuse, audiophiles always like to changed it. It’s a replaceable part, they can do whatever they want. About other modifications. Maybe those are not so cost effective, but they will not make things worse. Silver wire/Silver connectors can be an improvement. Mods in the Level 3 make smaller difference but will not hinder the original design, more likely improve performance slightly. Holo Audio and Holo Audio USA work together to bring you Spring Dac in the USA in three versions. 
 
 
Best Regards
Jeff Zhu"
 
 
And though Jeff approves the mods we have done, we have done most of our listening testing without him involved. I like that he is very conservative in saying they are slight improvements. To me and our tuner, they are significant. But that's our opinion. We want to setup a reviewer with two dacs. One level 2 and one KitsuneTuned Edition so they can do a comparison. That's only fair to let the Dac speak/sing for itself.  I hope this puts everyone at ease knowing that we are not just randomly tweaking or tuning. These are all carefully selected components added to the dac that present a level of HiFi performance we are proud to offer the USA market.

 

[monkkx]

Hi all, I'm very curious about an A/B comparison versus Hugo TT. Has it been done? If so, I'd appreciate a link, I couldn't find any.

 

[koolblue3]

Oh Dear. Thank you. I actually am a nice person in person but then... I'm going to assume the mid-range is all you hope it could be. Tone? It's late so I was going to be a bit silly. Instead, I could have bought a nice safe Auralic system for all the money I've spent, but no fun and no learning. Yggy seemed a safe bet as well. And perhaps I needed more research but Yggy did not seem to be keen on over sampling adventures. The Spring DAC has that nice Oversample button. You can drop-kick your 44k stuff to 384K or DSD. Or have pure NOS. So NOS does have the most beautiful Tone. It is not a syrupy mess. It is smooth, not a hint of anything harsh but has all this soundstage with immense detail stretching out to the horizon. Up sampling does change the Tone and soundstage. Things get a bit sharper. The sound may be tightened up a bit. Soundstage is a bit more Normal. Actually closer to what I get with the Master 11. Of course the Spring DAC is up on the railing with me looking down at poor Master 11 below. (I can't believe myself). I'm using my HD800 set with a Norne Draug II cable. Caution! I believe that cable is Magic. And I might be cheating by having my MacBook USB plug into the Singxer SU-1 then into the Spring HoloDac (let's play Scrabble with the only letters being HoloAudioSpringDac). I have only briefly tried the Spring DAC's USB, plain vanilla, no Intona, Regen, Jittebug yet. The SpringDac USB sounded pretty damn fine on it's own. I'm sure that's proof of something for someone right there. It may be a bit louder than the SU-1 unit. I had to turn down my amp a bit. Teensy bit bolder sound? The Intona has made an immediate, audible improvement to everything I have tried it with. It could be a real treat with the Holo Spring DAC. Tomorrow after Svengoolie.
One more thing about tone. I was convinced that Balanced sounded better than Single Ended. So I bought a Single Ended microZOTL OTL Tube amp. Get it all over in one fell swoop. I needed to find out. I ahem, really do put my money where my mouth is. And I found out Single ended Can sound just as big and wide and buzzword-able and as enjoyable as Balanced. The Holo Audio Spring DAC is just as nice Single Ended as it is running Balanced.

How about Dynamics and transient response ?