Company History

In this article we will be reviewing the new HiFi Rose RS520 All-In-One Integrated Amp with a built-in streamer, which appears to be a merging of the HiFi Rose RS150 Streamer and HiFi Rose’s incredible RA180 Integrated Amplifier.

If you have not heard of HiFi Rose, they are a newcomer to the high performance audio scene but the company has a really interesting history. They are part of a larger company called Citech who specializes in interactive touch screen kiosks for public spaces. They have actually been in business since 1954, based in Seoul Korea where everything they make is manufactured in house.

One of their executives is a big fan of classical music as well as a hard core audiophile, and in 2017, launched a new endeavor — HiFi Rose. He set up HiFi Rose to be very engineering focused with 70% of the team being engineers. When you think about it, this seems like a dream audio start up. You have the resources of a large tech company with years of experience in making robust interactive technology. Plus, you have someone who loves good sound driving the products they design.

Most music streamers have a pretty simple front panel interface and rely on a custom app for the majority of the control and set up. HiFi Rose, with all of their kiosk experience, decided to set themselves apart with an amazing front panel display unlike anything the audio industry has seen before. And boy, did they hit this out of the park!

HiFi Rose engineers also decided to cut no corners on the audio technology and use some of the very best DAC’s you will find in any music streamer.

Design & Build Quality

Even before you turn on the RS520 hifi music streamer, you can see it is built to extremely high standards. The aluminum chassis just exudes class with the way the ventilation openings are cut out with the side panels having what look like heat sinks. And wow, what a chassis it is. To reduce any chance of vibrations, it is made from a solid block of aluminum. And to keep the design really clean, the power, volume, and mute buttons are slightly recessed into the front of the top panel.

When you push the power button and the 12.6” wide LCD touch screen lights up, you can see what sets HiFi Rose apart. The super large screen just makes it such a different user experience. You can scroll through the sources easily and the graphics are just incredibly clear. Anything to do with typing in search or setup information is really easy to use with the large display and bigger keyboard.

It is smaller in width than the standard 17” wide hifi component so it will not take up as much space on your shelf and it's really cool that the display fills up the entire front! Everything about the build is just first class.

Features & Technology

The source choices through streaming are more than what most audio streamers typically offer. You get the usual suspects of Spotify Connect, Apple Music, Qobuz, and Tidal with full MQA decoding. One very interesting choice that HiFi Rose offers is a commercial-free portal into YouTube videos called Rose Tube. You can also send any streaming video content out to your TV as well, even 4K Ultra HD videos. Rose Radio is their internet radio system, which interestingly also has Shazam built in. For digital music libraries, you can pull in High Res files from a local device or your network. For fans of CD’s, the RS-520 can even replace your CD player if you add the optional RSA-780 CD Drive. You can play CD’s, and even rip them to the 520 if you add an optional internal SSD drive. And finally for Roon fans, the RS-520 is a Roon Ready endpoint. Before we get to the other rear panel sources, let's take a look at the EQ screen.

Roon: Everything You Need To Know >

The Rose EQ system one is set up for two purposes. You can access this from any music source by pressing the meter icon, then the little EQ button. First, there are some built-in curves for various types of music genres but those will just change the sound and likely not make it better. However, this one is different from what you typically see with EQ or advanced tone controls from other brands. Almost every single room is going to have one or more frequencies where you get a very large peak due to the way the sound interacts with the room dimensions. Sometimes those peaks are very sharp, only affecting a narrow range of sound. Other times they are wider in effect. Peaks like this can really color your music, which is one reason we are such big fans of home theater products that have automatic room correction to knock those peaks down. The catch with general tone controls or EQ is you are not able to fine tune anything. One room may have a sharp peak at 68 Hz, while another may have two at 43Hz and 75 Hz, while a general tone control may only cover 100 Hz. This is why we love the way HiFi Rose designed this EQ system — you can move the area the EQ bands cover. There is one caveat in that they separate them by about 20-30 hertz, so you cannot put one at 71 and another at 72, but bass peaks are almost always further apart than their band limitation so it should work well. This is great for taking out those nasty bass peaks. Now, you will need to use some kind of room analysis tool like room EQ wizard to find where they are, but if you want to audio geek out and fix your room, HiFi Rose has provided you with just what you need!

Another neat part, and granted, this is only eye candy, but you can switch the big display to meters only that you can adjust to have various looks and colors. We have to admit it’s a lot of fun finding a look that compliments my system!

Should you just want to hide your RS520 away and not play with its amazing display, HiFi Rose has a pretty well done app for both iOs and Android. We found this very straightforward and easy to use. It also has a cool feature called related tracks, where the song playing lists about 20 other songs that are similar, which is a great way to find new music you might like. Below that are all the song credits. We do have one tip if you are using the app instead of the unit for volume control. If you are on a song, you have some limited adjustments to volume only, but if you tap the tiny little remote icon in the upper right hand corner, you will find all kinds of cool functions including controlling those super neat meters.

Taking a look at the rear panel, you’ll notice all of the RCA type connections are the higher end chassis mount type you see on very serious high end audio components. They are actually nicer than the coax and analog inputs on the more expensive RS150 streamer preamp.

You get digital coax and Toslink in and out, preamp outs, one analog input, a USB in for computer audio, an Arc HDMI input, an HDMI output, and several USB ports for attaching a bluetooth dongle, HiFi Roses own CD ripper/player, or a USB drive for music files. There is even the capability of adding an internal SSD hard drive to store your ripped files on.

The speaker connections are also solid and in line with what we expect in this price class. While you may think of the HiFi Rose RS520 has the name says, HiFi only, the fact that is has a Toslink connection means you can connect about any TV to it to greatly improve your TV sound, and better yet, if you have a newer TV with an HDMI Arc connection, the TV remote will then control the volume of the RS520 if you use the HDMI Arc path. Plus, don’t forget the RS520 is a high end YouTube video player with their curated content — which means you can cue up those concerts and watch them on your TV while enjoying your great home audio speakers.

Expert Advice: your TV may come defaulted to Dolby Surround audio out, for any two channel system like this you will need to go in and change the output to be PCM.

When we first heard their current top of the line RS150, we were impressed with the fact it had the very best DACs available from ESS, their flagship ES9038PRO. Many consider this to be the industry's best DAC you can buy right now. This DAC has a very low noise floor of -122db and supports PCM at 768kHz, 32 bit and also supports DSD512. Along with those great specs, it has extremely low jitter. When we first heard about the RS520 we thought it would have the next step down from ESS, but no, the RS520 has this exact same DAC! That is impressive!

Now, we should point out the RS150 is built with a fully balanced design, which gives it a big advantage and will surpass the RS520 in streaming. For substantially less than the RS150, the RS520 includes a pretty unique amplifier built in.

So that is half of the new RS520, the preamp and streaming section. The amplifier half is straight from the new tech they developed for the super cool RA180 integrated amp.

The HiFi Rose RA180 integrated amp uses a new type of amplifier technology we are starting to see pop up. There is a new type of FET which is made using gallium nitride or GaN for short. This new FET gives the Class D amp section much faster switching time, making it sound more like an analog Class AB amplifier. There is even a new Class for this design called AD. The big advantage of Class D has been its efficiency, which means you can put more power into a smaller package. This new AD design allows HiFi Rose to include a 250 watt per channel amp in the RS520. Now if you look closely at the amp spec though, this 250 watts per channel number is not with both channels driven across the full frequency spectrum at a low distortion number, they simply spec 250 watts. Under the distortion spec they claim a low number at 150 watts per channel at 1kHz. We suspected the RS520 would behave like a good 100 watt per channel Class AB amplifier, which is still very respectable for everything you get in this unit for its price.

Performance

Getting the RS520 setup was very easy. If you are doing WiFi, don’t forget the USB dongle with an antenna that is in the accessory box. Typing in your WiFi and music streaming credentials is super easy on the big keyboard on that great front panel display. We can’t say enough about how much fun the front panel interface is to use.

The first track we tested with was “Tecumseh Valley” from Nanci Griffiths 1993 Other Voices, Other Rooms. This is a duet with Nanci and Arlo Guthrie accompanied by acoustic guitars, bass, a drum kit, and fiddle. Both artists put a lot of emotion into the recording of this song, especially as it progresses through the sad story they are telling. The thing that stood out to us was how separated every instrument and the two voices were. The fiddle felt like it was floating just inside the left speaker. Each of their voices was clearly separated and you could easily pick up those small changes in expression that make the music sound more like the performers are there in person. We had been listening to some pure analog with all tubes before we switched over to the HiFi Rose and we were impressed with how there was zero digital edge at all. This cut really showed off the musicality of the RS520.

Next was “Lay Me Down” by Crosby & Nash from their 2004 album. This track is far bigger and fuller with a lot of deep bass. Like the first track, this is another duet. At about 1:20 into the song, the duet turns into multiple overdubs. When this hits on a great system that is well set up, you can actually hear the voices way outside of the speakers. The RS520 checked this off too with ease.

Another cut that is a really interesting piece for fine harmonic details, believe it or not, is a Rolling Stones cut, “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” from their 1969 Let it Bleed album. This track used the London Bach Choir and on a good system you can hear the individual voices of the choir floating in the middle. But the real test is at about 55 seconds in when Al Kooper comes in with a french horn solo. Right at the very end, it sounds like they overdubbed in the horn again at about an octave lower. If you play this on a high end set of headphones, it is pretty easy to distinguish. However, on most audio systems, unless the DAC and rest of the chain is really good, it is almost impossible to hear. We could hear it with the RS520 which is a big positive for its DAC.

The next cut was “Thanks To You” from the 2001 Boz Scaggs Dig album. This is a pretty popular demo cut in audio circles as it has some really deep bass lines behind some great vocals by Boz Scaggs. The RS520 did really well here, but this may be an area where a true Class AB amp might do better on the tactile feel of the bottom end attacks on the bass line.

We finished things up with “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore” from the 1989 When Harry Met Sally Motion Picture Soundtrack. This cut has Harry Connick on vocals and piano and is a great one to listen for tiny details, tonal quality, and dynamics. In the beginning the RS520 was able to let us hear the feel of his hands on the piano keys and even the foot pedals. When the baritone guitar comes in, which sounds a lot like an upright bass, the tonality was just fantastic. And finally, about half way through, the horn section blasts in to show off the dynamic capabilities of a good system. The HiFi Rose once again sailed through these tough tests.

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Overall Recommendation

After putting the RS520 through its paces, we think HiFi Rose priced it too low!

It has the same DAC as their top of the line streamer only. It comes with a powerful amp that has a very warm sound. The rear connectors are first class. And to top things off you get that beautiful front panel interface with its super cool features and displays.

We see the RS520 being a great step up for someone who wants very high performance sound in what is a very attractive and small package. Or for that manner, anyone looking to move up into serious home audio. It can outdo many separate components that cost a lot more and take up very little shelf space. But to us, it would not matter how big it was or how it looked, the unit just sounds fantastic. The great display and form factor are just an added bonus.