just a data point -- i leave my red on 24/7 and it's not even warm to the touch.

i'm really interested in comparing a holo may dac to my chord dave. is anyone in greater metro boston interested in a "home" and "away" comparison? i'll bring my dave to your place to put into your system, if you'll bring your dave to my place to try in my system. my hqplayer nuc8i7 can...

the cyan 2 was released just seven months ago -- your info about different build options isn't correct. https://www.kitsunehifi.com/product/holo-audio-cyan-2-dac/

good call!

you need roon bridge installed on that pc -- that should fix your problem.

you've got the wrong software on the win10 pc -- you need the right software for it to be treated as a zone. you have to download/install roon bridge. roon remote serves only a control interface. as @genefruit mentions below, did you mis-describe what you've installed where?

The loud minority seem to have self inflicted issues, it's not the Red. Not liking or not understanding the capabilities doesn't necessarily mean its a product issue (IMO) . . .

His issue has nothing to do with the Red. Personally, I've had zero issues - I find it quite easy to use.

That's a pretty old processor - I think mine uses the same. Basically, your issue sounds like your laptop doesn't have the power to upsample that high. So you have two choices, do the best you can with what you have or get a more powerful computer.

i think you're making it too complicated. first thing to understand is that the NAA runs on the red -- no other computer needs to have NAA on it. in my opinion, you should put hqplayer and roon on your powerful pc and just let it run all of the time -- you want qobuz and tidal routed through...

it's very easy to set-up the holo audio red in roon -- plug an ethernet cable into the red; open the red web page and select roon (plus a couple of roon options); go into roon and enable the holo audio red. that's all there is to it.

With that cpu you should be able to upsample to dsd256. I don't think you'll be able to do dsd512.

Net, net on this forum is that the Spring3 is better than the Cyan2. Now whether that's worth 2.5x the price of the Cyan2 is a personal decision.

Upsampling to dsd512 in software (HQPlayer is the best way) and running the May in NOS mode is the way to go.

he was agreeing with you . . . he said apparently daunting (i.e. he meant some may find it daunting).