Deathmatch: Pi2 Design Mercury 3 vs Holo Audio Red

Thanks, Marv. I appreciate hearing your impressions. While I haven’t heard the Holo Audio Red, I think that @Michael Kelly has developed an exceptional product at an exceptional price with the Mercury V3. It’s hard to find a comparable product at this price point that has the same functionality and sound quality. I hope that more people can hear it.

I previously used the Lynx E22 for several years. It remains a solid contender in sound quality, but the Mercury simply offers far greater functionality, so I’m not going back.

 

we need a throw down of mercury 3 vs mercury 2 vs pi2aes

 

Thanks for this, as a PI2AES user with Atomic Bob noise nuke for a long time, I do not want a warm/warmer source. However I wonder if Mercury V3 is noticable improvement over our PI4/PI2AES contraptions since you put those 2 (merc 3 and holo) on same technical level.

Also can you tell me if I should buy gungnir 2 or Yggdrasl gs2 !

 

Nice video and thanks for the comparison. How much of a step up would the v3 be over a V2 with lps? Any comments on the internal DAC? Would be cool to get an opinion on it vs something on the lower end like the latest Wiim.

 

Yes now you can get into source and DAC matching well. Maybe Holo is better with xx and mercury with xxx but yeah gungnir 2 and gs2 specifically would be cool, since they're only $100-$200 apart. I would think less warm source might be better with gungnir 2 but what do I know.

 

They both use some variety of a Pi based setup to run the OS but the Holo has a much bigger auxiliary daughter card that lets it upsample to much higher levels with hqplayer. I’m not convinced that’s as much better as it is different but if you have time that’d be the big thing to explore with it. Typically people are upsampling to dsd256 or dsd512 which may point to a difference in their dac (pcm vs dsd) too idk.

 

Mercury V2 used the same power supply circuitry and CM4 as as the V1. V3 uses an internally mounted PI 4 with the afore mentioned noise filter.

 

The video was well done Marv, cheers, I hope they catch on!

I don't hear any problem with the upper mids in my Holo RED, but I do have some fancy fiber optic gizmos.

I just wanted to point out that it's very easy to make the RED wireless. All you need is this cheap BrosTrend Ethernet to Wifi adapter from amazon. And unlike what you'd think, it's super easy to setup, it takes all of 4 minutes. And then works without issue and you've got a wifi enabled RED.

 

Will this make it to the homepage at some point? Just asking for a friend!

 

I would still like to see the same OS vs each other. After testing a variety of Pi distros with the Red, the stock Red OS is actually probably the worst of them all. Volumio is mostly fine. Gentoo is probably a bit better stock, but also complicated to setup and it has all the kernel options. moOde was just below Volumio and then Red OS being the worst of them. It even sounded better UPnP vs as a Roon Core in Red OS. And yes, like @haywood was saying with hqplayer.

 

But the RED is the most stable upnp os I’ve ever used. I haven’t had to restart it ever. Compared to often every week with other pi os.

 

I’ve never tried the Red, but I’ve been running JRiver on the Mercury V3 for over two months and haven’t needed to restart.

 

The Red OS is also the lightest and smallest OS I have seen. It only supports a minimum of services.

Do you set your UPnP to Performance Mode?

 

yeah.

 

From my experience that’s just A lucky 2 weeks but I guess we’ll see!

 

Hoping my second Red will arrive in the next week or two. I've never tried RopieeXL on the Red or any other OS besides stock Red OS. I am using RopieeXL on an RPI 4B right now. It locks up constantly. RopieeXL has an automatic restart function built in and I have it resetting nightly. I still have to manually reset the RPI4 if I am feeding it HQPlayer upsampled PCM or DSD. If I play a lot of native DSD from Roon the RopieeXL RPI4 will also lock up. So, it does not seem to like high bit rate streams. It is on Ethernet.

I have never had the Red OS lockup on the Holo Red. I will try RopieeXL on my second Red when it arrives. I am skeptical that there is any reasonable difference. What I plan to do is definitively decide if USB or I2S is the best source from Red to Spring 3 KTE DAC. I still think I2S rhythm and timing is better than USB. With two Reds I can go back and forth quickly to verify once and for all and hopefully do the world a great service.

 

wild... I use RopieeXL on both Pi3 and Pi4 based devices, and it runs for months on end without a problem. I can't remember the last time I've had to reset any of my devices (1 at work, 3 at home). I just checked the uptime on the work device and its at 98 days... my guess is that the restart was a power failure.

That said, I'm not feeding it anything special (just roon) and I do not have auto update on... this particular one is running version 2024.06 (1677)

 

I run jriver on raspberry pi os - resets are rare.