RATING
PERFORMANCE
FEATURES
ERGONOMICS
VALUE
MY LISTENING room has seen components from three different South Korean audio manufacturers over the past year, and in each case the performance, build quality, and aesthetics of the product have been uniformly superb. But what really impressed me about them is the extent to which each used software and/or circuitry developed in-house rather than purchased off-the-shelf. Call me slow, but I think something special is going on south of the 38th parallel.
The recent arrival of the RS150 ($4,995) a reference network player from HiFi Rose, brought the number of South Korean manufacturers represented in my listening room to four. HiFi Rose is a division of Citech, a 50-year-old, Seoul-based consumer electronics manufacturer. A slick example to today’s envelope-pushing music playback gear, the RS150 packs a streamer, a digital-to analog-converter (DAC), and a digital preamplifier, all managed by the Android-based Rose OS operating system. Given my experience with gear made by Korean audio companies, I suspected that the RS150 might contain more than a few proprietary components. When I learned that the company has nearly 25 engineers on staff, I became fairly sure of it.
FEATURES
Positioned above the RS250 ($2,495), the RS150 is HiFi Rose’s flagship streaming DAC. The company makes four additional RS or “Rose Streamer” players, including some that contain an internal amplifier. Finally, there’s the RSA780E, a $449 CD drive that links via USB to the
