Nenon

Yes, it is full height as it's designed for the Extreme / Olympus. Same with the Taiko USB card. It's just another thing Taiko will have to support if these were open to DIY.

Oh well, I guess that might not happen in the (foreseeable) future then? Even if some owners of Extreme were upgrading to the Olympus at some point, Taiko might still wanna keep their USB cards for refurbished Extreme and therefore it could very well be end of the story for we mere mortals IMHO. As of right now, Taiko is super busy and prefers to stay away from supporting the DIY community. That means: 1. The USB card is only available to Taiko Extreme customers; and 2. The Olympus I/O is only supported with Taiko Extreme or Olympus. The Olympus I/O XDMI is an interesting piece. While it is expensive, if made available to the DIY community one day, it gives you access to a lot of the new Taiko technologies. It has the Taiko BPS and XDMI. So it makes your DIY server a state-of-the-art DAC. I am waiting to receive my Olympus XDMI and Olympus I/O XDMI and play with them. But if what Emile has been sharing is true, those could be better than any USB-based DAC, regardless of the price. While I really want to believe that, I won't speculate much before I have first hand experience. As a Taiko dealer, I can try to be a voice for the DIY community. If I go to Taiko and say we have let's say a group order for 50 USB cards or 20 Olympus I/Os, and if I handle some of the support needed, there is a chance that may work. I haven't really mentioned any of that until now, because I haven't listened to the Taiko Olympus yet, and I did not think there would be enough interest here for any type of group order. But I might be wrong of course. On a completely different topic - I think someone shared this earlier but if you want to see my interview with Ron Resnick , here is the video for that: https://youtu.be/OOYkmIZ3G7A My room acoustics has changed quite a but since then as I discovered the RPG Modex plates / modules and those made miracles in the bass region. Speaking of bass, I am also working on different horn bass subs. And the video clips at the end really suck and don't represent what you are hearing in my room. But other that that, you can see me and my listening space. I am planning to start a YouTube channel in a few months too. Last but not least, if anyone is looking for a used Taiko Extreme server, I have a couple of friends I am trying to help. Not for commission, just as a favor. Send me a PM if interested.

Sounds like you have installed Roon with graphical interface, not the headless / server version.

If the ULPS is inside the server chassis and it is always connected to the DC to DC ATX, you don't need to use resistors as the DC to DC ATX will discharge the capacitors. If the ULPS is in a separate chassis and you will be disconnecting it, it is highly recommended to recharge the capacitors. In that case you can a discharge resistor close to the output. Just make sure it sized properly. I had a custom plug that I used to connect on mine with a heavy duty resistor inside the plug that I used to discharge the ULPS at some point. I think I used a 2.7K / 2W resistor. The ULPS that Sean Jacobs provides has a discharge resistor inside.

Although this is not what the Olympus uses, if I was still experimenting with DIY servers, I would try the first one with an Eypc CPU. Or just stick to the Dual Asus SAGE, which we know it sounds amazing.

Just to clarify - that was with the initial design that used several Mundorf MLytic HC Power caps. This 220,000 uF custom capacitor ( https://taikoaudio.com/taiko-2020/product/diy-taiko-audio-mundorf-220-000-uf-power-cap/ ) made it possible to fit it all in the Taiko DIY chassis. There are some photos of excellent builds if you search these pages. No, I haven't had a chance to do that yet.

Half height... but Jord has a solution for full height as well.

Met with Jord @Pink Faun at Axpona yesterday, and we talked in depth about his new USB card, and all the development and challenges he ran into before releasing it. It has supercaps that take about two minutes to fully charge. But you need to have power on startup, so the computer can initialize the chip and then you need to switch to supercaps power so quickly that the chip cannot detect it (think nanoseconds).

Great. That should work.

Agreed. That's would be the best solution. A few years ago when I was considering a cost no object server there were two things I wanted to engineer. One was a two chassis solution so when they are stacked there is a special plug on the top panel of the bottom chassis and on the bottom panel of the top chassis. This way you don't need an umbilical between the two. I had a pretty awesome sketch that I drew on a piece of paper. When I showed it to a manufacturer, he said "Oh no!!!" because it was super complicated to manufacture. The other one was PCIe DAC that eliminates the need for USB, similar idea as Taiko's XDMI. Those are probably extreme cases, but if you can design the two chassis to minimize the umbilical length, that will be awesome.

Sorry to ruin the party but I have to say this - a long umbilical between the ULPS and the Taiko ATX will negatively affect the sound quality. I would keep it as short as possible and make it with as thick wires as possible. I am saying this from personal experience but also had some interesting feedback. The only one time I've heard someone preferring a regulated linear power supply (the absolute best version of the teflon DR7 PH made before scamming dozens of my friends) over a well built unregulated LPS + Taiko ATX on the dual SAGE motherboard was when a two box solution was used with an umbilical over 1 meter long. I advised that person to redo his build with the Taiko chassis and the ULPS inside the chassis, and he never looked back. The bottom line is that the umbilical length is crucial and I advise against using two chassis.

I think discussing a chassis for the dual CPU Asus Sage build is right on topic here. After more than 4 years of experimentations, 245 pages, and trying many different motherboards and CPUs, nothing comes even close to the dual CPU Asus Sage, at least not on these DIY pages. Not even the custom purpose motherboards with fancy clocks, masterclocks, etc. But that dual CPU Asus Sage is quite difficult to passively cool down for multiple reasons. First, it's using a server based CPU with not so popular socket in the AV sector. Second, it has two CPUs. Third, the motherboard size is very big. As far as I am aware, only HDPlex has a working solution. HDPlex is pretty good at cooling down one 85W CPU but handling two is pushing the limits of its heatsinks. And as good as this DIY server sounds, if you can drop the temperature a bit, it sounds even better. This is where a better chassis will really shine. And that product does not exist. It will be really cool if you can make one, @AngeloVRA.

Great. I personally feel like the DIY community desperately needs a high end chassis, and what I've seen from your post looks like top notch quality. The forum rules are that you cannot advertise your own products but you can answer questions. So let me be the first to ask - how much are you planning to sell them for and how can people order it?

So this is a commercial product, not a DIY project?

@AngeloVRA - very nice work indeed. Is it big enough to accomodate a dual CPU ASUS Sage motherboard?