I first started reviewing music streamers back in 2015 with the IQaudio DAC. Subsequently, the ALLO BOSS + Piano with the BOBW PSU and then the KATANA + Isolator + Shanti.
There is plenty of choices when it comes to something like this from Audiophonics, Topping, French Audio. But for me and at this price point, the Revolution DAC as a package is much more attractive.
All of the products from ALLO have always surprised me in regards to performance. Since the BOSS was released in 2016, ALLO and their technical team seemed to go into overdrive.
The Pioneer PD-91 is considered a rare piece of equipment to own but in 2020, is it worthwhile owning such a classic piece of kit.
With the announcement of a suited Power supply for the KATANA, the whole Allo Dac package is now totally fulfilled. I had been waiting for this for quite some time. It's now time to see what this thing can really do. I really hate using standard plug-in supplies. They are noisy and cheap but they do the job. But with the Allo kit, using these cheap supplies the KATANA still blew me away. So what could a suited low noise linear PSU bring to the picture?
To find out more about the Katana DAC, click
HERE!
The LPS is quite a hefty little thing incorporating high-quality components. The transformer has a dual output galvanically isolated 5.2V 3A and 5.2V at 1.2A outputs so it can also power the RPI 4. It uses a huge capacitance bank to reduce 50/60Hz noise and filtered by an LDO and caps up to 15.000uf.
The next stage is the supercapacitors which is where the final power comes from.
The Primo is the new music streamer from Volumio. From out of the box it looks very discreet. No functioning lights, not even on the front of the unit. No buttons either so as you can see, it's very minimalistic.
I've been using the Allo DAC products from the start and although there were some very understandable development hic-ups on the way. But now Allo has flourished as a company and offers a plethora of high-quality audiophile products and the Katana is one which really stands out from the crowd.
On my last review of the Allo Boss DAC, I wondered how things could get any better? Well needless to say things have just got better, a truckload better.
Digital always surprises me in its steps forward in sonic performance, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse.
In 2016 I was using the IQAudio DAC+ for quite some time and found it to be really quite astonishing for such a small unit. It was the first DAC I used in conjunction with the Raspberry Pi. But then along came ALLO. The latest ALLO unit at that time was the PIANO 2.1 DAC. It also used an SBC (single board computer) which was a different build construction to the RPI called the Sparky.