I’m a Canadian dealer and have received and Oladra Presence late last week. A couple things worth sharing with the community. Because the new units strive for such a high sound quality bar (SQ), some features we’ve had in the past won’t be available initially, or not at all because they unfortunately they lower the SQ bar. For example:
- Because USB is the predominant DAC connection type, it was chosen as the defacto standard for the initial release. While some DAC’s might prefer AES, I2S, or Toslink, having extra outputs raises the noise floor. BTW the USB implementation on the Oladra is stunningly good. It might be as late as Q4 before other iterations (dealer installable) are offered. (like UBS/AES-EBU etc.)
I have always been enamored by the Roon interface and how you can drill into artist details, members in the song sessions - all fascinating stuff. It was the best GUI vs the other options. Never was a fan knowing that Roon (both server & player) would not yield the best SQ. I was a fan of using Squeeze on the player side as it had a nice uptick in SQ. That combination not being offered because the new hardware is so good with a pure Roon/Roon implementation. I’m been informed that the SQ with the Roon Server / Squeeze player had almost no difference. (A limitation is the Squeeze player can only render 24/192. If your source file was higher, it wouldn’t work) With Roon end to end there was no limitation to the maximum 32/768 resolution. If you still want Squeeze end to end, just use the Lyrion option in the setup. I’ve been informed it is somewhat better, but it’s marginal. (Once my unit is completely broken in I’ll have a go at that and report my findings)
The initial hard drive offering is limited to 4tb internal and isn’t user upgradable. (Return to service depot for that.) No date yet for drive upgrades. The good news is, most users don’t have local libraries higher than 4tb and the streaming has got so good, most users can’t be bothered curating local copies.
Cheers,
Ian Anderson
Northstar Audio
Kitchener, Ontario