Review of HiFi ROSE RS150

Background

I've been playing around with DIY network streamers for quite some time now, started with a Beaglebone Black with i2s output, which was terrible, raspberry pi with various DAC hats and ended up listening to digital audio on an Intel i5 mini-itx in a very nice fanless case from Streacom (highly recommended) with a Soekris DAM1021 (another piece of hardware which is highly recommended).

But i got bored of tinkering with stuff and thought to buy an off the shelf network streamer and a good R2R dac, which remains my favourite.

I bought a new DAC, MUSICIAN Pegasus (Review Here and measurements from Audio Science Review Here) which is a very good piece of ChiiFi i got my hands on, very sturdy, excellent sound quality, albeit lacks some features people may be looking for like changing filters, headphone amp, etc. I am very happy with it as just a DAC.

The Pegasus, hooked up to a Minis Forum UM700 mini PC running Daphile was driving my Trafomatic Audio Experience MK2 300B amplifier hooked up to a pair of awesome Klipsch Cornwall 3 Special Edition matte black.

All went well but i started to feel the limits of Daphile in terms of user interface. Don't get me wrong, Daphile blows all other open source and free streaming software, even most of the commercial ones in terms of quality and features, but somewhat lacking in 3rd party support.

Recently I got into comparing streaming services, reading up on what are people's opinions on the subject so I had to try for myself, seeing this is a veary subjective matter.

I tried the main ones, Spotify, Tidal and Qobuz all subscriptions paid and all, but suffice to say Daphile had issues, Spotify kept disconnecting after some time, i was not able to save albums from the streaming services, as favourites, or organise them in a meaningful way and since I did not want to buy ROON, as i find it too expensive, I started looking for new off the shelf hardware which will not break the bank.

I have shortlisted Auralic Vega G2.1, Aurender (the cheaper versions hehe) and Lumin. Yes there are other options but from less known manufacturers and very hard to find reviews or otherwise useful information.

Even for the above, I had difficulties finding information about the software that runs the units. Everybody is talking about what a shiny case, what a nice touch, how accurate is the femtoclock driving the DAC (pffeew) and so on, but almost nobody shows and talks about usability, features, how well the software performs and so on.

I've asked around groups about Auralic and Lumin, to be honest I did not like what i got as feedback, which left Aurender. I booked a session with a dealer (about 300 Km from where I live) but unfortunately (for him) i could not go that day.

Before I had to reschedule, I decided to look around again and found the HiFi ROSE RS150.

HiFi ROSE

HiFi ROSE Is a Korean company (south, of course) quite new in the business but this product looked very interesting and decided to skip Aurender and go for this one, slightly more expensive than Aurender, but it promises good software and features.

I did watch some Youtube videos on the subject and everybody seemed happy with the unit so I decided to get it.

3 Weeks after the decision, I received the unit from my usual source of kinky stuff at Audiophonics.fr and I was a bit stunned about the weight of the package ... 20 Kilos :)

I am not going to talk about the chassis and connectivity and what they do, every self respecting audiophile can understand that from their website, the others which simply don't care it's enough to say that it has all you need to listen to music with it, still, here's a picture i took :)

HiFi ROSE RS150 Back

The front screen is impressive, even though for its size is quite low res, but it's good enough to show some nice vumeters while playing music:

RS150 with MUSICIAN Pegasus on top

The Software

I am not going to talk about all the software details, you can find plenty of info out there if interested, especially on Youtube (even though I think most of them are sponsored) but whatever.

Day 1

Unit arrived, unpacked, plugged in, software updated to the latest version with no issues, however, CONS:

- Time and Date does not support Daylight Saving. WHAAAAAT ? Had to put the wrong time zone so i can get the current clock, a big shame:

Nice, big clock which can be always on. Sorry for the dust :D

- Weather widget on the clock, a very nice addition. Too bad you cannot add your own City and the selection of countries and cities is very very limited. And when i say limited, for Belgium it only listed 2 cities, granted Belgium is a shitty small country but still, they must be using some external weather services that includes a shitload of cities. But moving on

- Remote control. I had to try and pair it 3 or 4 times. It showed as paired but it did not work. The RS150 however paired fine with my nVidia Shield, not sure for which purpose, but it did. Once paired, the remote control works like a charm

- Analogue output. Obviously, it works, very low levels (did not measure them yet) on the single ended output. My amp is only 8 WATT but something tells me the line level is below what it should be.

Thanks god the Balanced outputs can be configured between 0.5v to 9v output level. Again did not measure, but 9v seemed on par to what my old Soekris DAC was outputing at 4.5v.

Oh, i am saved, i can still use my 8 watt amplifier. Guess again, those settings are lost when you switch outputs. Oh my god !

- Internal DAC, it's fine, not going to comment on the quality, i don't like it, but that's most likely because there's no DAC filter control. It would have made a huge difference if we had a way to change filters on the AK4499. Yes it does, look at Cambridge Audio players ffs !

- External DAC, is supported. I eagerly plugged my R2R DAC into one of the unit's USB ports then ... nothing. DAC not being detected in the output section.

A standby/power on helped, i suddenly remembered

The IT Crowd by Channel 4

No, it's not running Windows, it's actually Android, but whatever, the DAC was detected as DSD capable. Oh Joy !

Rushed to play some highres FLAC files, all fine, the dac indicated the correct sample rate, next onto DSD. Nope, think again, RS150 indicated DSD to PCM convearsion, even though my DAC is perfectly capable of playing DSD up to 1024.

Ok well, i don't have tha many DSD files (maybe about 1 TB, erm) but downsampling sounds good enough, until they fix the software

- External DAC power. The Pegasus, obviously does NOT use USB power, which is a good thing. An even better thing is detecting USB power to turn itself on and off with the equipment driving it, n'est pas ? The DAC does support that, however the RS150 does not. ports are not turned off while on standby. I guess this is because of the BT/WiFi dongle used for the remote control and, obviously, WiFi. 

They claim 0.6w standby power, but i can plug 2 USB things on it's 2 ports which would eat up 5W of power in standby. Ok i'm a bit anal here as its 0.6w of unit consumption not accessories, but still. I'd like those ports turned off so i don't have to turn on my dac first since I can turn on the whole unit from either the remote control or the mobile application (yes it does, awesome feature).

- Qobuz Integration. Released only 3 days ago, works awesome, I can even add Qobuz albums to my favourites and play them after, excellent. Until if you switch albums too fast the unit gets dazed and confused and refuses to do much.

I can put it in standby, however Qobuz was still playing audio in the background. Only solution was to turn the unit off and then back on (see above).

The software issues, I can understand, they are releasing new versions quite often and implementing new things, I just hope they listen to the community (see me lol) and fix some of the details, because in the end, the devil is in the details.

To Be Continued, i'm going to torture it a little bit more for the first day.