savoy014

Introduction I recently spent a few quality days with the Holo Spring Level 3 DAC, courtesy of Sound Affairs, Singapore distributor for Holo. There is plenty of chatter in various audio forums on the Holo Spring DAC, especially on the high level of performance it delivers for it's price. Description The Holo Spring is a really nice looking DAC (I adore those copper side panels), and is solidly built. It probably has the largest display I've ever seen, and the dot matrix panel is fully legible even from my listening position.  The Spring DAC is a  R2R DAC design. What differentiates the Spring from the rest of it's competition is that fact that DSD is decoded using a R2R circuit too. This is achieved by having two separate R2R circuits - one for PCM and the other for DSD. The front panel has four buttons. The first button puts the DAC in standby mode, while the rest of the buttons control the display intensity, oversampling mode and source. There are four oversampling modes,...

Frankie Pang, representative of Entreq Asia was in town recently to meet up with Entreq users. Frankie spent an afternoon at X-Audio, the Singapore dealer for Entreq, mingling with both Entreq customers and prospective ones. I have been using Entreq products for a while now, having owned and used the Minimus and Tellus grounding box (together with Eartha Silver grounding cables) for a few years now. I did a review on the Olympus Ground Box, Tellus and Eartha Silver grounding cables (click here for the Olympus Review, and here for the Tellus / Eartha review). Frankie shared with me information on some new products, in particular the K2, Everest and Tellus 2. The K2 and Everest are upgrades available to any Entreq grounding box user - you simply need to replace one or more of the binding posts with either the K2 or Everest. Frankie was confident that the use of either could significantly improve the performance of the ground box in question. He suggested that using one or two pieces sh...