I've had the May KTE edition for 18 months and have zero plans of replacing it. I like this DAC because it is neutral and true to the source, other brand DACs have the manufacturer's signature sound throughout their product line.
I used to use JRiver Media Player as my digital source. The May lets me hear that JRiver has a nice little mid-bass bump that makes even average recordings sound better, but once you hear it, the bump adds it's character to every recording whether it needs it or not.
I can play CDs using the digital out of an Oppo Blu-ray player into the May and actually it doesn't sound bad at all but the May does expose the limits of the medium.
I have been using
HQPlayer with a medium powered music server and the combination really shows off how good the May KTE really is. The learning curve can be steep, the
Audiophile Style HQPlayer thread is dauntingly long but the rewards are worth it. Hint: instead of reading the entire thread, read the last 5 pages and plug in the filters everyone else is using as a starter. You may never need to change.
But there is plenty to discover in all the conversations, I use the poly-sinc-gauss-long filter and upsample everything to DSD256, it's very nice. Other filters can closely approximate other manufacturer's DAC sound characteristics. The comments below are the most recent, a deeper search into the HQPlayer thread would uncover other DAC/filter similarities.
"Particularly huge effort went first into poly-sinc-ext2 and then later to poly-sinc-gauss-long to make these as good all-rounder filters as possible, for wide array of different music genres. Even though latter is called "long" it is still pretty much middle grounds in terms of length. These are what one could still call "compact" without trading off anything really.
"Note that given otherwise same parameters, only thing that filter length affects is roll-off steepness. Longer the filter gets, steeper it becomes. All other properties stay the same.
[Chord DAC] "Chord-style filters sinc-L group and sinc-short/medium/long the length also affects stop-band attenuation."
https://audiophilestyle.com/forums/topic/19715-hq-player/page/1189/#comment-1256131[In the latest HQPlayer 5.2.0] "...find new linear phase halfband filters.
"I found the xs one to be very interesting. IMO it shows some similarity to xtr-short."
Miska replied:
"It is something I actually made because someone asked what would be closest to Mola-Mola filter, and there weren't any. So this one fairly closely matches the one used by Mola-Mola. And it is very similar to most DAC chip filters (ESS etc) in terms of response as well. Relatively slow roll-off and fairly low attenuation.
"Main difference to Mola-Mola and DAC chip filters though is that these are single stage to final output rate.
"Since halfband filters are non-apodizing, those are only suitable for content where the Apod counter stays 0 (or close, like under 10)."
https://audiophilestyle.com/forums/topic/19715-hq-player/page/1190/#comment-1256534"So Mola-Mola Tambaqui falls in category of slow roll-off. Although still not nearly as slow as MQA filter which is down only by -18 dB at same point. Or ESS slow roll-off which is down by -12 dB. These are however only down by -3 dB at 22.05 kHz (green line), so these are halfband filters and thus will have notable leak around Nyquist."
Charts included in post:
https://audiophilestyle.com/forums/topic/19715-hq-player/page/1192/#comment-1256677