Holo Audio Spring 3 KTE impressions

Well, on one level its "the same" but like anything it's all in the implementation, so in real world often no. With this DAC, now that you have read the thread you can see it's a different dac when you feed it upsampled PCM.

 

Could someone tell where the fuse is located on the Spring 3 Dac and what specs are needed for the fuse? If it is located identically and has the same specs as the Spring 2 Dac, then I would replace it there as well

 

I'll keep my impressions short and sweet. I've had the Spring 3 KTE for over a year now and am very happy with it. I upgraded from an OG Gungnir MB and the Spring 3 seemed to be an immediate improvement. I still use the Gungnir as part of my headphone setup and it does quite well there, while the Spring runs the main 2ch speaker set up.

In the year I've had the DAC I've played around with all the HQP filters that my CPU can handle and I've come to the conclusion that I simply prefer NOS. 99.9% of the time I'm listening to the Spring with no oversampling.

USB input is the best sounding with i2s as a close second. i2s is seems more "edgy" whereas the USB sounds more smooth and natural sounding.

Spring 3 is being fed via LMS and Squeezelite running pCP on the RED. Preamp is a Freya-S in passive mode, which I feel is an excellent and extremely affordable pairing.

 

I own a May KTE and a Spring 2 KTE. I ran both in NOS until I switched to HQP SDM (
poly-sinc-gauss-xla/poly-sinc-gauss-hires-lp, ASDM7EC-super, auto bit rate, 12288000 rate limit) which was the first configuration with the May to fully dominate OG Yggdrasil for my headphone chains. I liked NOS overall, but it sounded a bit smeared in the upper bass, which was totally fixed by this HQP combination.

 

IMO on the Spring 2 the i2s is still a hair better than USB to me, but I have no idea how the designer got USB to sound that good (relatively) on the Spring 3. Probably the only DAC I've heard before where USB is the best input.

 

I noticed this from the May KTE as well! I'd been searching for the cause, you saved me a nervosa journey.

 

Tim himself thinks USB is the best way to transmit digital audio.

 

So does HQP's developer: https://community.roonlabs.com/t/hqplayer-not-working-in-pcm-mode-above-384khz-output/104876/7

 

That could be. I don't have anything powerful enough to run the more esoteric DSD combinations unfortunately. I would have to boot that machine up and look at the settings I have going on, but I did find some DSD settings that I could run that got pretty decent results.