Hello everyone,
Let me introduce myself. I am 64 years old and live in southern France.
I have been retired for two years. I was an IT manager and developer for 42 years.
I am the administrator of France’s largest hi-fi forum https://forum-hifi.fr, and am also a member of several hi-fi and home cinema forums, such as www.homecinema-fr.com.
My username is the same as here.
I am passionate about hi-fi and home cinema, but unfortunately I only have a living room, so I have to make do with that.
I have had a Rose RS151 for a month and a half.
Several people I know are interested in the RS151, but for the moment I can’t recommend it because they have questions that I don’t know the answers to.
I have had several streamers in recent years, in order:
Oppo Sonica
Primare SC15
Primare PRE35
Atoll ST300 signature
Eversolo DMP-A8
Auralic Altair G2.1
I have a Keces S300+ power amplifier and Récital Audio Illumine speakers.
So I have over 20 years of experience with hi-fi and home cinema equipment.
I’ll give you my impressions and wishes.
The RS151 is a superb device, both in terms of its appearance and its performance.
It’s the best device I’ve ever had in terms of sound quality :
Very dynamic and well-defined without being clinical.
Tight and controlled bass.
Detached and natural human voices.
High frequencies that reach high but are never aggressive.
The very high-quality sound reproduction exceeded my expectations, especially since it replaced a much more expensive Auralic Altair G2.1.
Comfort and usability:
- Superb touchscreen
- Beautifully finished chassis
- Simple but adequate remote control
- Good menu ergonomics
- Super-fast start-up in less than 5 seconds
- Lots of inputs and outputs
- All online audio services
- Real-time synchronization of creations, modifications, or deletions of files or folders stored on the SSD drive.
Missing features:
1 - The ability to set the volume to maximum on the analog input when using a home theater system.
Since there is no bypass function that would allow me to connect the front outputs of a home theater amplifier to the analog inputs of the RS151, I am forced to set the outputs to 12 dB (max) on my home theater amplifier and set the level to 55 on the analog input of the RS151.
Why 55? Because if I listen to hi-fi the next day, the volume of the RS151 would be at 55, and if I set it higher, I would risk damaging my speakers if, for example, I played a rock song.
It is certainly possible to adjust the volume of all inputs, but you can only play between -10 dB and 0 dB.
Ideally, it would have been better to allow more dB on the analog input or to have maximum volume for consistency with the home theater section.
It would have been great to be able to save the volume levels for each input. In that case, I would have set the analog input to 100, which would have allowed me to set the outputs on my home theater amplifier to 0.
Many people on forums don’t understand why there isn’t a real bypass function on the analog input, which would allow the RS151 to be used in a home theater setup and which is found on competitors’ products such as Eversolo, Lumin, Auralic, Atoll, etc.
2 - The ability to set a maximum volume level to avoid mishandling the remote control or smartphone volume button.
3 - The ability to set a volume level at startup.
These two features are very important, and they were present on all my previous devices.
They serve to protect the speakers from excessive volume that could damage them.
Imagine that in the evening I listen to classical music at a volume of 60/65, and the next day I listen to a pop or rock song. The sound will be too loud, with a risk of damage to the speakers.
Two simple new settings would be welcome: maximum volume and start-up volume.
It’s software, so it shouldn’t be difficult to implement.
4 – The ability to assign a button on the remote control to turn the screen on or off, because the app requires a lot of manipulation.
5 – The ability to view the SSD drive with another application such as BubbleUPNP or Hificast, but unfortunately the RS151 is not visible to these applications, even though they can see the shortcuts created on the RS151 that point to a NAS server.
Points for improvement:
1 - With an SSD hard drive, it should be possible to highlight the track being played in the folder view without having to go through the playlist view, because if I start with the 7th track in that folder, when I switch to the playlist view I won’t see the first 6 tracks and will therefore have to juggle between views to play the previous tracks.
2 - Ideally, there should be a scroll bar at the bottom that displays the progress of the track with a cursor that allows you to move through time.
3 - In a folder where there is only one album, sometimes the covers don’t match when they should be the same.
4 - The ability to display either the file names or the tags.
5 – The overall ergonomics of the application; too many steps are required.
6 – A shortcut in the application to directly access playback from a folder located on the SSD without having to click on: Music → Directory → ROSEDISK → File folder.
7 - Be able to reduce the display brightness even more, make it more dimm for late night sessions.
Areas for improvement :
1 – With an integrated hard drive, when restarting or after booting up, the drive is not immediately recognized, even though it is clearly visible in the multimedia manager.
This same drive is recognized without any problems on several PCs.
I think that analyzing the content takes too long because sometimes it appears tens of minutes later.
I have about 10,000 files and 600 folders on the SSD.
2 – The search function on the SSD using an artist name, album name, song name, or folder name does not work, which is really inconvenient.
3 - There is also a problem with playlists.
I created five, but only two appear in Music → My Music → My Playlist.
However, in Home → My Playlist, there are five.
Why is this ?
Until I have these answers, I cannot praise the merits of this device on all the forums I am registered with.
This could affect hundreds of people who are potentially interested in the RS151.
I had everything translated by DeepL because I am not fluent in English, so please bear with me and feel free to ask me questions if anything is unclear.
Thank you in advance.
)
