Holo May vs Lampizator

[WildPhydeaux]

Mine is an all-digital system. All my CDs and SACDs have been ripped to FLAC and DSD and are stored on a NAS in my utility room. I use Roon Rock on a dedicated machine also in the utility room. The Roon interface is on a notebook by my listening chair. Queued music is streamed from Rock to a Holo Red via wired network.

Both USB and I2S are enabled on the Red with the former feeding the Lampizator and the latter to the May. I have both of those endpoints grouped in Roon, so they both get the same feed. Roon is not set to upsample anything and I do not employ HQPlayer. The May is set to NOS mode.

The DACs are connected to adjacent single ended inputs in my preamp. I can toggle back and forth between them and there is essentially no delay between hearing one and then the other.

If I get what you're saying, upsampling could be employed and possibly tweaked to "tune" the sound to my ear. I'm totally fine playing around with that and indeed have thought of trying HQPlayer as it's supposed to be "the best", or at least much better than Roon for upsampling. However, this is an avenue leading away from the current reality that tube changes in the TRP make all but no difference in its sound.

I can look at upsampling options in the future, but right now I am focused on what, exactly, the Lampizator brings to the table. So far my impression is its a great sounding DAC that will make many different types of vacuum tubes glow, none of which make an appreciable impact its excellent sound.

Cheers,
Robert

 

[tedwoods]

I have a Lampizator/LTA combo as well and it sounds amazing, but my front end is very different...
I see you are all set up for Roon, but in my case, since I had a similar set-up in the past (Roon Nucleus feeding the SOtM trifecta), the limiting factor proved to be Roon...
Roon was "homogenizing" everything to a point that changes further down the system weren't working...
As soon as I got away from that, everything started clicking once again, but it took me some serious self-convincing to actually accept it and move on...

 

[WildPhydeaux]

Another member reminded me of this thread. Apologies I never closed the loop on this, but I did end up preferring the Lampizator.

I had two transparency limiting bottlenecks in my system, one which was a surprise and the other I should have known. The first was that preamp, DACs and source were powered via a PS Audio Stellar3 Power Regenerator. Power amp direct to wall. This had made positive improvements back when I had somewhat lesser gear and also lived in the city. Turns out that living rural and with current gear its not only not required for clean powet, but actually robs some transparency and dynamics.

The second thing is something I should have tried earlier. The input tubes in my preamp were not ideal. I swapped them out for some known good Siemens and they let the sun shine in.

Now I can readily hear differences in tubes swapped into the Lampizator. The May is still a darned good DAC, but at the end of the day the Lampi has the edge in absolute realism and 3D holographic sound stage.

Cheers,
Robert