Upgrading digital side

I currently own a.... ..... Holo May KTE DAC. 

I am  looking to upgrade my entire digital side.  I have an extensive CD collection that I will continue to listen to as well as thousands of files.

 I know that the DACS I mentioned also stream, but I’m not sure that I want to be completely tied to Roon or Audirvana.  I like the idea of internal storage for my files.

Any advice on the best combination of the above (or something I haven’t looked into yet) would be greatly appreciated.

You are an excellent candidate for PGGB. Once you hear your redbook CD’s remastered to the format preferred by your Holo I guarantee you will not listen to your CD player anymore, and you will stream less. I am all in: In my system with my T+A DAC 200  DSD 512 remastered CD’s sound better than the 24/192 Qobuz streams for those albums that are available as such, and all those old wonderful CD’s that aren’t available as high res streams because they are not popular enough? Well it sounds like they all got re-done by Steven Wilson. I believe your Holo prefers PCM so that is how you would remaster them. Doesn’t hurt or cost anything to try it, just a little effort, provided you have a decent computer to run the software. Send me a PM. 

PGGB

testimonial

@yyzsantabarbara I’m also interested in the GeerFab. Please share your thoughts once you’ve listened to it in your friend’s system. 

@arafiq We were not able to get the D.BOB to work on the Allnic because I forgot the remote to my OPPO BDP-83. I have owned the D.BOB for about 5 years and it worked flawlessly with my Benchmark DAC3B using the OPPO, However, when I got the Yggi+ OG (a much better DAC) I fumbled around on the OPPO menus to try and get it to work. When I took the OPPO to my friends the settings were locked in place, and I had no way to change it.

I burrowed his RME ADI-2 DAC fs DAC and when I got home, I got PCM and DSD to work with the RME. Only difficulty was the very complicated RME DAC settings. It sounded good on SACD, but I preferred the brighter Benchmark DAC3B (now sold) that livened up the sound, 

Now comes the interesting part. I wanted to try once more with my Yggi+ OG DAC to see if it would work. The designer of the D.BOB told me it would not. I started asking ChatGPT prompts on the feasibility of using the OPPO | D.BOB | Yggi+. ChatGPT was adamant that it would work but I came to a dead-end and realized my very old $150 used OPPO is missing a second HDMI output on the OPPO that should solve the final issue. 

I then went to USAM and bought a used $240 OPPO BDP-103 which has dual HDMI outputs. I will get it this week and see if it works based on ChatGPT’s advice. If it does, I expect it to be great and a big win for me since I love the Yggi+ OG.

I did some online research on my friends DAC, and it will work with the D.BOB using SPDIF since it supports DoP up to DSD128. THE Allnic and D.BOB would likely have worked with my older OPPO bdp-83 if I got the settings on the OPPO menu correct. The BDP-103 is almost certain to work with the Allnic.

Bing Videos (Allnic DAC I wanted to work with the D.BOB)

In terms of sound the D.BOB with CD/SACD is really tied to the DAC you hook it up too. 

Just to clarify you do not need a screen to run the D.BOB. I needed it to do a 1-time setup of the OPPO settings. Another point is that ChatGPT’s advice on this issue is originating from audio knowledge bases like A’gon et al.

A nice budget.  I am sure that you will get a nice outcome.  A few suggestions/observations.

 1) I totally agree about separating the streamer from the DAC.  Of the two I would place more budget in the DAC.

2) regarding SACD. I get excellent results with a my Oppo 105 playing SACD over HDMI to my Bryston DAC 3 which has HDMI inputs.  The Oppo has to be programmed in settings to output SACD over HDMI.

  Oppo of course is long gone but their creators moved on to Magnetar and the setup menus are the same.  Magnetar players are supposed to have good internal DACs.  With your budget you could afford to add a separate player just for SACD or if you find a DAC that accepts HDMI use that DAC for both SACD,CD, as well as the streamer.  My understanding is that Bryston no longer makes SACD DACs.

   I listened to the McIntosh SACD-DAC combination that uses a MCIntosh proprietary input between players.  It was awesome.  At the time I saw it the combo was about 11K.  Even if it’s gone up that still leaves a healthy budget for streamers.  Good luck

@mahler123 I was reading about Bryston DAC 3 doing HDMI. What I was surprised to hear was that a PURE DSD stream was going into the DAC 3, though that should be a function of the OPPO.

BTW - as I am writing this, I am listening to the RME DAC and the B.BOB with my very best disk, an SACD version of DSOTM. Neither Qobuz of Tidal (I have both) sound as good on this album as my SACD. I was sad when my modded Sony SCD-1 died and then me selling my Benchmark DAC3B. I had no way to listen to this great disk.

I had 3 ROON ONLY Sonore OpticalRendu streamers. One of them died after about a decade of work and I am going to sell 1 more of them because I will not stream in the bedroom system anymore. I will use the D.BOB and disks. It is such a waste to most listen to my disks.