Bigscreen Sound

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.

- By Howard Kneller

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.

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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 company's streamers and lets you play CDs or rip discs from your collection for storage on connected drives.

Any discussion of the RS150 should start with the elephant in the room: the streamer's oversize high-definition full-color LCD touchscreen. Measuring 14.9 inches diagonal and taking up most of the unit's front, it displays not just menus, album cover art, and track information, but cool stuff such as videos, graphic VU meters in a choice of styles and colors, analog and digital clock faces (each with weather information), and an old-school-style stereo receiver interface complete with a digital tuner flywheel and the sound of static in-between stations.