Tony22 I have in the house Bluesound Nodes, an ifi Zen Stream, and in the past have used the bridge 1 and 2 plus the Matrix although I no longer have those.
I do not have anything like 300 hrs on the AL yet. But I sat with the spousal unit for a bit and compared it to the Node and Zen Stream, both via a Cardas USB cable. We both felt that the AL was getting… I dunno… maybe 20% more info out of the file…maybe a little more. it wasn’t like OMG these other things sound like crap, but there was a clear advantage that did not take much listening to detect. Still adding those hours. I have not used the holo or other competing products than can output to I2S so can’t really help with that comparison. But I am very happy so far, both sonically and operationally.