Topping and Holo Audio have collaborated to bring the Centaurus—their newest R2R DAC—to market at a price tag of $999 USD... but is using Holo Audio's notoriously accurate R2R implementation enough to make Centaurus an R2R DAC people should consider purchasing? Join GoldenSound as he breaks it down.
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Have you tested the Centaurus since a number of firmware updates? I no longer hear the distortion when playing 44.1 kHz tracks and was wondering if this was my imagination or if they did fix this.
I have the centaurus and when it was connected to my A70 I would get occasional, very occasional artifacts. I have since moved it to my pure tube amp and given it some time while I re-arrange my listening setup and it’s nothing but butter.
*I just rewatched the video and remembered that it was a NOS issue. I have just let it be and went to check the setting’s and it was set to “best”. Which in my book is glorious. I lack the enthusiasm to test different setting’s at this point because I have my chain ($4k chain at current prices) next to a couch that you can only relax on and all but fall asleep. But those 30+ minutes that I am awake are absolute gold. When I get my tungsten and move back to my listening room with a recliner and can stay awake I may want to tweak the setting’s, however short of the desire to inform others of setting’s I may not use…. I really don’t see the point. Set to “best” it’s a pure dream on any headphone I have deemed worthy of time on my dragon and centaurus. When it works well why tear it apart and find the weak points? I have Nothing that sounds like this combo does and I love it.
**ok I just spent some time on the first 15 second’s and followed up with the first minute of this track
And I really can’t tell much difference between NOS OS and Best. I was hoping to force myself into a spot of “holy crap this is jitter”, because my entire reason for spending countless thousands in this hobby, mosly in mid-fi, is to learn what someone means when they say this or that. And I’m NOT trying to defend my purchase, rather my philosophy. I’ll just buy something else if I need to, but I don’t see a reason.
I truly want to experience jitter, because I don’t know what it is. Like what does soundstage mean until you hear the Zeus? What is warm until you hear the Fidelio X3?
Can someone tell me how to pinpoint jitter?
Anyways, the chain I was just on. Pixel 8 via USB-C → Centaurus → Dragon IHA-1 → ATH70x Refine. I truly can’t hear anything other than slight volume changes. I even tricked myself into thinking I heard jitter only to realize it was on Best instead of OS x16. I have no idea if my unit is updated.
Maybe my meat melon doesn’t know how to hear these thing’s, I am almost 45 but I do know that my knee jerk reactions are the most reliable.
I don’t think you can do that without test equipment. How would you know how much jitter is occurring?
A usb connection does not contain a clock (the clock is inside the dac) so not much you can do with usb connection.
Coax and optical contain a clock so maybe using 100 feet of crappy cable would cause abnormal jitter, but again how would you know without test equipment?
I may have experienced jitter for the first time, but considering I don’t know what jitter is, it could be a different problem like my USB cable being poor quality.
System:
Pixel 8 via USBC to B adapter –> Topping Centaurus –> Dragon Inspire IHA-1 –> ZMF Atrium Open
For some reason when I opened up Dreams (2001 Remaster) by Fleetwood Mac on TIDAL it was almost like a dirty vinyl or a briefly skipping CD. Kind of a crackle. I went and listened to some other stuff on soundcloud and no issues and I messed with the OS (did this during the initial track listen as well to no avail). After some time I decided to open up the same song on soundcloud and no issues at all. Opened it back up on Tidal and the issues were there again, I know this happened on several fleetwood mac song’s but didn’t notice it on anything else in tidal. So I rewatched @GoldenSound ‘s video on the DAC and put it to NOS. Somewhere along the way I realized my BT was connected to two devices, both the dac and my minidsp so I turned the BT off and then opened the track again, this time “MAX” and “24-bit 96khz FLAC” was gold, previously it was greyed out and it’s fine now?
Sorry if this doesn’t make sense and I can’t tell you what was the culprit, but I really don’t know what I’m doing and randomly changing thing’s appears to have fixed it.
Can someone tell me if this was jitter or a separate problem I encountered? Also is there a way to update the firmware on this? I’m going to practice some google-fu now and see if it can be done.
*ok I just updated it, I was on 0.18 now I’m on 0.44
I never updated it because I had almost no issues, maybe once or twice I heard an odd artifact until today. I’ll get back and state whether I have any issues.
**ok now that it’s back on my computer I think I know what the problem was, when my phone thought it was on BT it defaulted to 44.1 even though it was on USB. I just set it to 44.1 with no issues at all, it’s not an apples to apples comparison because it’s PC vs Phone but I think it’s close enough. I think that in the past I’ve just never listened to 44.1 so I didn’t have issues but FW0.44 appears to have fixed the problem.
In these situations you have to eliminate all the variables and start with a known baseline.
This means using the simplest possible setup and verifying that everything is set up properly.
It seems like you have been battling connection type (usb vs bluetooth), dac settings, playback formats and source device. That is too many variables to make any kind of conclusion.
Jitter wouldn’t even be on my list of suspects until all other variables were in a known good state.
PC → Centaurus → A70pro → Atrium with NOS is working flawlessly with tidal now that I’ve updated it. But I’m running at MAX on tidal. Maybe I’ll switch it to 44.1 or “High” and see how that goes.
On Tidal, Max means Tidal will use the highest res it has available for the track, not that all tracks will play in hi res.
So if a track is only available at 44.1 it will play at 44.1 standard cd quality.
Tidal is able to change the resolution setting of the dac to match the track that is playing. If your dac has a display you should check that it changes to the same resolution of the track that is playing.