A novel way to massively improve the SQ of computer audio streaming

[StreamFidelity]

12 hours ago, jean-michel6 said:

Altogether sata on mobo is also an EMI nest and noisy. I have totally disable sata on my demat pc’s with great sq results .

 

That is also my experience.

[ray-dude]

14 hours ago, HeeBroG said:

 

Hi Ray,

 

Did you use the setup "wizard" WAN+2LAN or WAN+2LAN2? 

 

Geoff

 

 

 

Geoff, I used this as the baseline for my setup:

 

https://github.com/mjp66/Ubiquiti/blob/master/Ubiquiti Home Network.pdf

 

Far more complex than most folks need, but you can filter down from here.  My mods were to connect a second ERX-SFP (configured as a generic switch) to one of the ethernet ports for the home network, and connect my WiFi access point (with my WiFi VLANs) and home wired ethernet to the second ERX (this optically isolated my home ethernet and WiFi network from the first ERX)

 

I also configured one of the other ethernet ports on the first ERX to have its own subnet and DHCP server, for my audio network.

 

Basically, on the first ERX I have the above setup, with my audio net configured on its own subnet on the home network (192.168.9.x), the SFP port on the first ERX configured as part of the home network and connected to a second ERX via fiber (configured as generic switch) where the rest of my home network plugs in (WiFi, and wired ethernet)

 

My first ERX is powered by a DXPWR dual regulated 12V supply, energized by a PowerAdd Pilot2 battery.  Same supply is powering my ISP-provided ONT (basically the equivalent of a cable modem for fiber).  My audio network is ERX ethernet port to Sonore opticalModule (powered by DXPWR dual regulated 5V supply, energized by PowerAdd Pilot2 battery) to Finisar SFP module to single mode fiber to Sinisar SFP module to StarTech optical NIC in my Extreme.  See below for details

 

[ray-dude]

 

(deleted...dupe)

 

 

[jean-michel6]

14 hours ago, sandyk said:

 

At the suggestion of one and a half (Gary) recently, I made sure that the cases of my internal Samsung 860 Evo ( OS SSD) and 850 Music SSD had a VERY low measured voltage drop between their cases and 0 volts at the SMPS PSU itself when switched on.

As Gary found, doing this did result in an appreciable improvement in  apparent noise and Soundstage. even though both were powered by in my case , dual <4uV noise +5V supplies regulated down from the internal +12V supply

 BTW, the typical LT3045 implementation does have a decreasing output impedance at >100kHz and may result in a little harshness /added HF detail due to this. Ideally it would also have a parallel considerably higher value NON Low ESR capacitor at it's output for this reason.

Thank’s , if I use again ssd in my set up I would seriously considered these points .

[jean-michel6]

14 hours ago, flkin said:

Do you have a way to buffer the data on the pc player side? Otherwise the data has to pass through the network again defeating buffering. 

Data are not buffered at the player which for me is an engineered ered dock card acting as an upnp player .

 

[edwardsean]

On 8/7/2020 at 4:46 PM, jean-michel6 said:

I made similar experience in a different context . I used to have a dual pc set up and the music files were stored on an ssd on the server pc , the music files are buffered in ram before being sent through the network to the pc player . As a trial I did stored also mt music files on a small hdd connected through usb to the pc server .

I did buffer in ram the exactly same music file either coming from the ssd or the hdd .

Every time the file coming from the hdd was sounding better . ...

It is obvious that I had in ram exactly the same info coming either from the hdd or ssd , it means that something (some noise ... ) is embedded in ram withe the digital info .

Mysterious but real ....

I'm finding this too while buffering songs to Optane cache and then Apacer RAM in Euphony. The sound is different depending on where I get the source file, in my case, an SD Card vs. SSD. I don't actually hear an appreciable difference when I disconnect the drive. So, it's not additional noise from the drive. It's an artifact somehow preserved during the buffering–weird!

 

I know SSD is anathema, but all my audio files are upscaled 768PCM weighing in at 1GB-4GB per track. So, I need the speed if I'm buffering the entire song before play. The thing is SSD sourced files sound significantly better those from SD Card, which are hazier. I've been trying to discern if I'm just picking up induced excitation from noise, and I don't think so. Željko suggests that not all SSDs are alike and some may sound fine. I'm using a Sabrent SSD and it's working out well so far.  

[cat6man]

On 8/4/2020 at 1:28 PM, austinpop said:

 

I didn't do a lot of deep digging into LMS, but I didn't find any existing parameters to control buffering in LMS. I bet if you go hack the code, you could implement something, but this isn't a feasible approach for most.

 

This is what makes the Stylus player such a gem. I regard its "buffer queue to RAM" feature to be one of its major strengths, and one of the reasons it sounds so good.

 

 

You should definitely try this. Assuming you're using a good quality LPS on your NUC, you may be pleasantly surprised.

 

color me pleasantly surprised.

 

running squeezelite (audio-linux in ramroot) with the large -b buffering parameters was surprisingly good.

the limited amount of buffering available in the opticalRendu is noticeable in a head-head comparison with squeezelite.  similarly, hqplayer to the oR seems equally limited.

 

you can run hqplayer with a much larger buffer in the NAA if you edit the hqplayerd.xml file (250ms is the max via web interface).  i can run 500ms with the oR, but when i put the NAA in the NUC and run the slimrun USB, i can increase the buffering significantly higher.  you have to be careful though because the maximum value in ms you can use for red book will cause a crash when you try to play hi-rez audio (since the buffer is in ms, not MB).  note that my hqplayer test is with no signal processing or dither or upscaling as i like the sound of my DAC better that way.  i know Jussi, from a mathematical point of view, believes the buffer size has no impact as long as streaming is not interrupted, but here we are in the realm of things that are not yet amenable to math.

 

now that i am running squeezelite directly from the NUC to the DAC, i will give euphony another try.

 

also, my slimrun USB is powered at 5V by the same hdplex300 that power the NUC and the usb HDD, so i'm probably losing some of the galvanic isolation by passing that power down the slimrun.  i noticed that ray-dude is using a battery supply (followed by double regulation) so that may be a place for further optimization.

 

how much of the gain is from adding the -b buffering options and how much is from not going through my home LAN for streaming at all?  i don't know, but i guess the effort i put into improving the LAN network will still be beneficial for qobuz :)

 

thanks for the suggestions austinpop and ray-dude.

 

stay safe everyone!

[austinpop]

My First Week with the Taiko Audio SGM Extreme

 

Yes it's true. I just had to try one for myself.  And now that I've heard it, it's staying! But let's back up.

 

When I read @romaz's and then @ray-dude's accounts of their respective epiphanies with the Extreme, I fully believed this server was something special. I know these two gents personally, and even more importantly, we trust each others' ears. But the price. Oh, the humanity! How to justify something so expensive? What follows is the (typically creative) logic by which we audiophiles convince ourselves to justify new purchases. Well, not entirely creative.

 

Because here's the thing. As I talked about this with above friends, it became clear that the Extreme would allow me to shed most - not all, but most - of my spaghetti. Hang on, you shout, you love spaghetti! You've been talking about spaghetti on this thread for 3 and a half years. Aren't you the one who sent off your gear to be modded with little SMB cables running between little SOtM boxes? And all the cables? What is happening??

 

So I'll let you in on a secret. I hate spaghetti.  The spaghetti was never the goal. SQ was the goal. Spaghetti was only the means to an end, which was unavailable with "conventional" digital gear. But if you give me a conventional piece of gear with endgame SQ that needs no add-ons, external PSUs and clocks, I'll shed that stuff in a heartbeat.

 

No, my epiphany came not from a listening session, but from a spreadsheet. I looked at my current topology (Spaghetti Central):

 

and envisioned what it would look like (Extreme Edition):

 

Then it was off to the spreadsheet to tally up all the bits and bobs I could sell off, and I nearly fell off my chair. The spaghetti approach has the appealing characteristic of not making any one purchase too painful. But add all your stuff up (and I mean all of it) and you realize how much you've spent in aggregate. It's a frog boiling analogy. And if total expenditure was a temperature, and I was the frog, I was probably ready to serve. 🥵 I had spent HOW MUCH on the Spaghetti Edition? So tallying up the surplus gear yielded a number that, while nowhere near enough to fully cover the Extreme, did yield a very nice discount. Add a dollop of creative justification, some excellent chats with Emile, and it was done.

 

A couple of final point before I get into the listening impressions. One area that I've never been comfortable with is building my own servers. And it was clear that to achieve what the Extreme has would take patience and tinkering that even I did not have. This factored into my decision. And last - I was tired of all the tweaking. Even before the Extreme, I've been spending most of my time just enjoying my music. In fact, most of my posts here have been in the Album of the Evening thread. As Yoda the weary audiophile would say: Strong in me, the impulse to Be Done is!

 

Preliminary Listening Impressions

 

My unit benefited from about 3 weeks of Emile's torture burn-in script at Hengelo, so reached me already fairly burned-in. While I don't doubt it will improve further, what I'm hearing now is stunning out of the box. I won't waste words repeating what Ray and Roy have written in their excellent reviews here and on WBF. I'll just touch on some key points. I admit I was also prioritizing my comparisons with a view to freeing up gear to sell, so you may see a flavor of that here!

• Effect of the tX-USBultra: yup, it gets in the way. I know the guys had found this, but I was skeptical. Spaghetti has come and gone from my system, but at least for me, the tX-USBultra has always done good things in my system. So I was shocked to enter this new world, where the combination of server design and USB chipset (ASMedia 3142) rendered an external regenerator moot. And an extra USB cable, clock cable, and potentially the reference clock. Cha-ching!
   
• Comparison with my i7-8700k server: I had raved here only a few months ago about how good my 8700k server was, and these last weeks I've been saying to myself that I could easily consider what I had my endgame. The Extreme is just on another plane. It's not even close. Dynamics are better, as you'd expect, but it's not just about dynamic range and soundstage size, which is massive. It's also the dimensionality of instruments, and physicality of the lower registers. A cello or double bass pluck has a more physical gut effect (pardon the pun!). Similarly, you can feel the volume of the horns and trombone notes more viscerally. Finally, there's the layering. It's similar to the HMS effect, but in its own way. Instruments just separate better - not so much in space as between themselves. This can be disarming, and profoundly emotional, especially music that you already know and love. Suddenly you hear things that just never came to your attention before. It's mesmerizing, immersive, and quite intoxicating!
   
• HMS vs. HQPlayer: I had tried the HQPlayer sinc-M/LNS15/768kHz PCM-to-PCM upsampling on my 8700K server with Euphony OS, and felt that while it achieved maybe 90% of the HMS quality, the HMS just had that extra je ne sais quoi. Actually, I had a good guess quoi, I assumed it was Rob Watt's secret sauce in his WTA filter design. So imagine my surprise when on the Extreme I feel HQP comes within 95-100% of HMS SQ. Probably a credit to Emile's resource tuning, and perhaps potential for more here? With both HMS and HQP, the effect is stunning. Again, it's all about realism. The layering, the soundstage, the temporal coherence are all there, but now instruments feel so REAL. As dearly as I love the HMS, I'll take the 95% from HQP and sell the HMS for more cost mitigation. Let me emphasize just how good the Extreme/HQP, with an elegantly simple Sablon USB 2020 cable, makes the DAVE sound!
   
• Roon+HQP vs. HQPlayer standalone: On Roy's advice, I tried HQPlayer as a standalone player, without Roon dragging down the SQ. I had some initial issues with the learning curve, but was soon happily running HQP standalone via HQPDControl on my iDevices. There is a clear gap between HQP standalone and Roon+HQP. Shades of Stylus vs. Roon on Euphony OS. The best part of HQP standalone is that I can disconnect the Ethernet cable from the Extreme and eliminate the network completely!
   
• Network tuning is TBD: I still haven't played with network settings. Correction. My switch topology is still my optimized path for my Spaghetti Edition system. I need to revisit to see what sounds best with the Extreme. One driving force will be to see if I can do without my REF10 SE120 clocking my switches. Clearly for local music, I can completely mitigate the network by running HQP with the network disconnected, but Qobuz is an important use case for me, so I can't just unplug my way out of this. I also am anxious to see how Emile's upcoming switch plays in this equation. And hark! Is that a thundering herd of Buffalo headed my way?

[firedog]

3 hours ago, austinpop said:

My First Week with the Taiko Audio SGM Extreme

 

Yes it's true. I just had to try one for myself.  And now that I've heard it, it's staying! But let's back up.

 

When I read @romaz's and then @ray-dude's accounts of their respective epiphanies with the Extreme, I fully believed this server was something special. I know these two gents personally, and even more importantly, we trust each others' ears. But the price. Oh, the humanity! How to justify something so expensive? What follows is the (typically creative) logic by which we audiophiles convince ourselves to justify new purchases. Well, not entirely creative.

 

Because here's the thing. As I talked about this with above friends, it became clear that the Extreme would allow me to shed most - not all, but most - of my spaghetti. Hang on, you shout, you love spaghetti! You've been talking about spaghetti on this thread for 3 and a half years. Aren't you the one who sent off your gear to be modded with little SMB cables running between little SOtM boxes? And all the cables? What is happening??

 

So I'll let you in on a secret. I hate spaghetti.  The spaghetti was never the goal. SQ was the goal. Spaghetti was only the means to an end, which was unavailable with "conventional" digital gear. But if you give me a conventional piece of gear with endgame SQ that needs no add-ons, external PSUs and clocks, I'll shed that stuff in a heartbeat.

 

No, my epiphany came not from a listening session, but from a spreadsheet. I looked at my current topology (Spaghetti Central):

 

and envisioned what it would look like (Extreme Edition):

 

Then it was off to the spreadsheet to tally up all the bits and bobs I could sell off, and I nearly fell off my chair. The spaghetti approach has the appealing characteristic of not making any one purchase too painful. But add all your stuff up (and I mean all of it) and you realize how much you've spent in aggregate. It's a frog boiling analogy. And if total expenditure was a metric, and I was the frog, I was probably ready to serve. 🥵 I had spent HOW MUCH on the Spaghetti Edition? So tallying up the surplus gear yielded a number that, while nowhere near enough to fully cover the Extreme, did yield a very nice discount. Add a dollop of creative justification, some excellent chats with Emile, and it was done.

 

A couple of final point before I get into the listening impressions. One area that I've never been comfortable with is building my own servers. And it was clear that to achieve what the Extreme has would take patience and tinkering that even I did not have. This factored into my decision. And last - I was tired of all the tweaking. Even before the Extreme, I've been spending most of my time just enjoying my music. In fact, most of my posts here have been in the Album of the Day thread. As Yoda the weary audiophile would say: Strong in me, the impulse to Be Done is!

 

Preliminary Listening Impressions

 

My unit benefited from about 3 weeks of Emile's torture burn-in script at Hengelo, so reached me already fairly burned-in. While I don't doubt it will improve further, what I'm hearing now is stunning out of the box. I won't waste words repeating what Ray and Roy have written in their excellent reviews here and on WBF. I'll just touch on some key points. I admit I was also prioritizing my comparisons with a view to freeing up gear to sell, so you may see a flavor of that here!

• Effect of the tX-USBultra: yup, it gets in the way. I know the guys had found this, but I was skeptical. Spaghetti has come and gone from my system, but at least for me, the tX-USBultra has always done good things in my system. So I was shocked to enter this new world, where the combination of server design and USB chipset (ASMedia 3142) rendered an external regenerator moot. And an extra USB cable, clock cable, and potentially the reference clock. Cha-ching!
   
• Comparison with my i7-8700k server: I had raved here only a few months ago about how good my 8700k server was, and these last weeks I've been saying to myself that I could easily consider what I had my endgame. The Extreme is just on another plane. It's not even close. Dynamics are better, as you'd expect, but it's not just about dynamic range and soundstage size, which is massive. It's also the dimensionality of instruments, and physicality of the lower registers. A cello or double bass pluck has a more physical gut effect (pardon the pun!). Similarly, you can feel the volume of the horns and trombone notes more viscerally. Finally, there's the layering. It's similar to the HMS effect, but in its own way. Instruments just separate better - not so much in space as between themselves. This can be disarming, and profoundly emotional, especially music that you already know and love. Suddenly you hear things that just never came to your attention before. It's mesmerizing, immersive, and quite intoxicating!
   
• HMS vs. HQPlayer: I had tried the HQPlayer sinc-M/LNS15/768kHz PCM-to-PCM upsampling on my 8700K server with Euphony OS, and felt that while it achieved maybe 90% of the HMS quality, the HMS just had that extra je ne sais quoi. Actually, I had a good guess quoi, I assumed it was Rob Watt's secret sauce in his WTA filter design. So imagine my surprise when on the Extreme I feel HQP comes within 95-100% of HMS SQ. Probably a credit to Emile's resource tuning, and perhaps potential for more here? With both HMS and HQP, the effect is stunning. Again, it's all about realism. The layering, the soundstage, the temporal coherence are all there, but now instruments feel so REAL. As dearly as I love the HMS, I'll take the 95% from HQP and sell the HMS for more cost mitigation. Let me emphasize just how good the Extreme/HQP, with an elegantly simple Sablon USB 2020 cable, makes the DAVE sound!
   
• Roon+HQP vs. HQPlayer standalone: On Roy's advice, I tried HQPlayer as a standalone player, without Roon dragging down the SQ. I had some initial issues with the learning curve, but was soon happily running HQP standalone via HQPDControl on my iDevices. There is a clear gap between HQP standalone and Roon+HQP. Shades of Stylus vs. Roon on Euphony OS. The best part of HQP standalone is that I can disconnect the Ethernet cable from the Extreme and eliminate the network completely!
   
• Network tuning is TBD: I still haven't played with network settings. Correction. My switch topology is still my optimized path for my Spaghetti Edition system. I need to revisit to see what sounds best with the Extreme. One driving force will be to see if I can do without my REF10 SE120 clocking my switches. Clearly for local music, I can completely mitigate the network by running HQP with the network disconnected, but Qobuz is an important use case for me, so I can't just unplug my way out of this. I also am anxious to see how Emile's upcoming switch plays in this equation. And hark! Is that a thundering herd of Buffalo headed my way?

 

Congrats on your new setup. Simplification is good. 

I do visit your hometown sometimes, maybe when times are different  we can meet up and I can hear your system....

[beautiful music]

5 hours ago, austinpop said:

My First Week with the Taiko Audio SGM Extreme

 

Yes it's true. I just had to try one for myself.  And now that I've heard it, it's staying! But let's back up.

 

When I read @romaz's and then @ray-dude's accounts of their respective epiphanies with the Extreme, I fully believed this server was something special. I know these two gents personally, and even more importantly, we trust each others' ears. But the price. Oh, the humanity! How to justify something so expensive? What follows is the (typically creative) logic by which we audiophiles convince ourselves to justify new purchases. Well, not entirely creative.

 

Because here's the thing. As I talked about this with above friends, it became clear that the Extreme would allow me to shed most - not all, but most - of my spaghetti. Hang on, you shout, you love spaghetti! You've been talking about spaghetti on this thread for 3 and a half years. Aren't you the one who sent off your gear to be modded with little SMB cables running between little SOtM boxes? And all the cables? What is happening??

 

So I'll let you in on a secret. I hate spaghetti.  The spaghetti was never the goal. SQ was the goal. Spaghetti was only the means to an end, which was unavailable with "conventional" digital gear. But if you give me a conventional piece of gear with endgame SQ that needs no add-ons, external PSUs and clocks, I'll shed that stuff in a heartbeat.

 

No, my epiphany came not from a listening session, but from a spreadsheet. I looked at my current topology (Spaghetti Central):

 

and envisioned what it would look like (Extreme Edition):

 

Then it was off to the spreadsheet to tally up all the bits and bobs I could sell off, and I nearly fell off my chair. The spaghetti approach has the appealing characteristic of not making any one purchase too painful. But add all your stuff up (and I mean all of it) and you realize how much you've spent in aggregate. It's a frog boiling analogy. And if total expenditure was a metric, and I was the frog, I was probably ready to serve. 🥵 I had spent HOW MUCH on the Spaghetti Edition? So tallying up the surplus gear yielded a number that, while nowhere near enough to fully cover the Extreme, did yield a very nice discount. Add a dollop of creative justification, some excellent chats with Emile, and it was done.

 

A couple of final point before I get into the listening impressions. One area that I've never been comfortable with is building my own servers. And it was clear that to achieve what the Extreme has would take patience and tinkering that even I did not have. This factored into my decision. And last - I was tired of all the tweaking. Even before the Extreme, I've been spending most of my time just enjoying my music. In fact, most of my posts here have been in the Album of the Day thread. As Yoda the weary audiophile would say: Strong in me, the impulse to Be Done is!

 

Preliminary Listening Impressions

 

My unit benefited from about 3 weeks of Emile's torture burn-in script at Hengelo, so reached me already fairly burned-in. While I don't doubt it will improve further, what I'm hearing now is stunning out of the box. I won't waste words repeating what Ray and Roy have written in their excellent reviews here and on WBF. I'll just touch on some key points. I admit I was also prioritizing my comparisons with a view to freeing up gear to sell, so you may see a flavor of that here!

• Effect of the tX-USBultra: yup, it gets in the way. I know the guys had found this, but I was skeptical. Spaghetti has come and gone from my system, but at least for me, the tX-USBultra has always done good things in my system. So I was shocked to enter this new world, where the combination of server design and USB chipset (ASMedia 3142) rendered an external regenerator moot. And an extra USB cable, clock cable, and potentially the reference clock. Cha-ching!
   
• Comparison with my i7-8700k server: I had raved here only a few months ago about how good my 8700k server was, and these last weeks I've been saying to myself that I could easily consider what I had my endgame. The Extreme is just on another plane. It's not even close. Dynamics are better, as you'd expect, but it's not just about dynamic range and soundstage size, which is massive. It's also the dimensionality of instruments, and physicality of the lower registers. A cello or double bass pluck has a more physical gut effect (pardon the pun!). Similarly, you can feel the volume of the horns and trombone notes more viscerally. Finally, there's the layering. It's similar to the HMS effect, but in its own way. Instruments just separate better - not so much in space as between themselves. This can be disarming, and profoundly emotional, especially music that you already know and love. Suddenly you hear things that just never came to your attention before. It's mesmerizing, immersive, and quite intoxicating!
   
• HMS vs. HQPlayer: I had tried the HQPlayer sinc-M/LNS15/768kHz PCM-to-PCM upsampling on my 8700K server with Euphony OS, and felt that while it achieved maybe 90% of the HMS quality, the HMS just had that extra je ne sais quoi. Actually, I had a good guess quoi, I assumed it was Rob Watt's secret sauce in his WTA filter design. So imagine my surprise when on the Extreme I feel HQP comes within 95-100% of HMS SQ. Probably a credit to Emile's resource tuning, and perhaps potential for more here? With both HMS and HQP, the effect is stunning. Again, it's all about realism. The layering, the soundstage, the temporal coherence are all there, but now instruments feel so REAL. As dearly as I love the HMS, I'll take the 95% from HQP and sell the HMS for more cost mitigation. Let me emphasize just how good the Extreme/HQP, with an elegantly simple Sablon USB 2020 cable, makes the DAVE sound!
   
• Roon+HQP vs. HQPlayer standalone: On Roy's advice, I tried HQPlayer as a standalone player, without Roon dragging down the SQ. I had some initial issues with the learning curve, but was soon happily running HQP standalone via HQPDControl on my iDevices. There is a clear gap between HQP standalone and Roon+HQP. Shades of Stylus vs. Roon on Euphony OS. The best part of HQP standalone is that I can disconnect the Ethernet cable from the Extreme and eliminate the network completely!
   
• Network tuning is TBD: I still haven't played with network settings. Correction. My switch topology is still my optimized path for my Spaghetti Edition system. I need to revisit to see what sounds best with the Extreme. One driving force will be to see if I can do without my REF10 SE120 clocking my switches. Clearly for local music, I can completely mitigate the network by running HQP with the network disconnected, but Qobuz is an important use case for me, so I can't just unplug my way out of this. I also am anxious to see how Emile's upcoming switch plays in this equation. And hark! Is that a thundering herd of Buffalo headed my way?

Congratulations Rajiv for Extreme and happy listen.

[cat6man]

7 hours ago, austinpop said:

My First Week with the Taiko Audio SGM Extreme

 

Yes it's true. I just had to try one for myself.  And now that I've heard it, it's staying! But let's back up.

 

When I read @romaz's and then @ray-dude's accounts of their respective epiphanies with the Extreme, I fully believed this server was something special. I know these two gents personally, and even more importantly, we trust each others' ears. But the price. Oh, the humanity! How to justify something so expensive? What follows is the (typically creative) logic by which we audiophiles convince ourselves to justify new purchases. Well, not entirely creative.

 

Because here's the thing. As I talked about this with above friends, it became clear that the Extreme would allow me to shed most - not all, but most - of my spaghetti. Hang on, you shout, you love spaghetti! You've been talking about spaghetti on this thread for 3 and a half years. Aren't you the one who sent off your gear to be modded with little SMB cables running between little SOtM boxes? And all the cables? What is happening??

 

So I'll let you in on a secret. I hate spaghetti.  The spaghetti was never the goal. SQ was the goal. Spaghetti was only the means to an end, which was unavailable with "conventional" digital gear. But if you give me a conventional piece of gear with endgame SQ that needs no add-ons, external PSUs and clocks, I'll shed that stuff in a heartbeat.

 

No, my epiphany came not from a listening session, but from a spreadsheet. I looked at my current topology (Spaghetti Central):

 

and envisioned what it would look like (Extreme Edition):

 

Then it was off to the spreadsheet to tally up all the bits and bobs I could sell off, and I nearly fell off my chair. The spaghetti approach has the appealing characteristic of not making any one purchase too painful. But add all your stuff up (and I mean all of it) and you realize how much you've spent in aggregate. It's a frog boiling analogy. And if total expenditure was a metric, and I was the frog, I was probably ready to serve. 🥵 I had spent HOW MUCH on the Spaghetti Edition? So tallying up the surplus gear yielded a number that, while nowhere near enough to fully cover the Extreme, did yield a very nice discount. Add a dollop of creative justification, some excellent chats with Emile, and it was done.

 

A couple of final point before I get into the listening impressions. One area that I've never been comfortable with is building my own servers. And it was clear that to achieve what the Extreme has would take patience and tinkering that even I did not have. This factored into my decision. And last - I was tired of all the tweaking. Even before the Extreme, I've been spending most of my time just enjoying my music. In fact, most of my posts here have been in the Album of the Day thread. As Yoda the weary audiophile would say: Strong in me, the impulse to Be Done is!

 

Preliminary Listening Impressions

 

My unit benefited from about 3 weeks of Emile's torture burn-in script at Hengelo, so reached me already fairly burned-in. While I don't doubt it will improve further, what I'm hearing now is stunning out of the box. I won't waste words repeating what Ray and Roy have written in their excellent reviews here and on WBF. I'll just touch on some key points. I admit I was also prioritizing my comparisons with a view to freeing up gear to sell, so you may see a flavor of that here!

• Effect of the tX-USBultra: yup, it gets in the way. I know the guys had found this, but I was skeptical. Spaghetti has come and gone from my system, but at least for me, the tX-USBultra has always done good things in my system. So I was shocked to enter this new world, where the combination of server design and USB chipset (ASMedia 3142) rendered an external regenerator moot. And an extra USB cable, clock cable, and potentially the reference clock. Cha-ching!
   
• Comparison with my i7-8700k server: I had raved here only a few months ago about how good my 8700k server was, and these last weeks I've been saying to myself that I could easily consider what I had my endgame. The Extreme is just on another plane. It's not even close. Dynamics are better, as you'd expect, but it's not just about dynamic range and soundstage size, which is massive. It's also the dimensionality of instruments, and physicality of the lower registers. A cello or double bass pluck has a more physical gut effect (pardon the pun!). Similarly, you can feel the volume of the horns and trombone notes more viscerally. Finally, there's the layering. It's similar to the HMS effect, but in its own way. Instruments just separate better - not so much in space as between themselves. This can be disarming, and profoundly emotional, especially music that you already know and love. Suddenly you hear things that just never came to your attention before. It's mesmerizing, immersive, and quite intoxicating!
   
• HMS vs. HQPlayer: I had tried the HQPlayer sinc-M/LNS15/768kHz PCM-to-PCM upsampling on my 8700K server with Euphony OS, and felt that while it achieved maybe 90% of the HMS quality, the HMS just had that extra je ne sais quoi. Actually, I had a good guess quoi, I assumed it was Rob Watt's secret sauce in his WTA filter design. So imagine my surprise when on the Extreme I feel HQP comes within 95-100% of HMS SQ. Probably a credit to Emile's resource tuning, and perhaps potential for more here? With both HMS and HQP, the effect is stunning. Again, it's all about realism. The layering, the soundstage, the temporal coherence are all there, but now instruments feel so REAL. As dearly as I love the HMS, I'll take the 95% from HQP and sell the HMS for more cost mitigation. Let me emphasize just how good the Extreme/HQP, with an elegantly simple Sablon USB 2020 cable, makes the DAVE sound!
   
• Roon+HQP vs. HQPlayer standalone: On Roy's advice, I tried HQPlayer as a standalone player, without Roon dragging down the SQ. I had some initial issues with the learning curve, but was soon happily running HQP standalone via HQPDControl on my iDevices. There is a clear gap between HQP standalone and Roon+HQP. Shades of Stylus vs. Roon on Euphony OS. The best part of HQP standalone is that I can disconnect the Ethernet cable from the Extreme and eliminate the network completely!
   
• Network tuning is TBD: I still haven't played with network settings. Correction. My switch topology is still my optimized path for my Spaghetti Edition system. I need to revisit to see what sounds best with the Extreme. One driving force will be to see if I can do without my REF10 SE120 clocking my switches. Clearly for local music, I can completely mitigate the network by running HQP with the network disconnected, but Qobuz is an important use case for me, so I can't just unplug my way out of this. I also am anxious to see how Emile's upcoming switch plays in this equation. And hark! Is that a thundering herd of Buffalo headed my way?

 

congratulations!

[austinpop]

5 hours ago, firedog said:

 

Congrats on your new setup. Simplification is good. 

I do visit your hometown sometimes, maybe when times are different  we can meet up and I can hear your system....

 

Of course. Looking forward to post-Covid times...

[beautiful music]

54 minutes ago, austinpop said:

 

Of course. Looking forward to post-Covid times...

 

Looking expectantly to this comprehensive review.

[Exocer]

@austinpop , I enjoyed your write-up very much and look forward to your network tweaks testing with the Mutec REF10 SE120. While I know I will never own a TAE (I have to put my child through college first 😄) I will live vicariously through you and the other owners. Please, do keep contributing to this thread. It wouldn't be the same without ya ;). It appears as though once people get the TAE they disappear, never to be found again... I'm guessing listening takes up too much of their time.

 

Cheers

[austinpop]

One of the items that is now surplus to my needs is my Schroeder HFC CT-2 BNC cables between HMS and DAVE. Normally I would list this in the classifieds section, but I figured this is one item whose primary audience is on this thread, so I'll just mention it here. Apologies for the OT digression.

 

If you're interested in this cable set, just PM me and I'll send you the details.

[ray-dude]

5 minutes ago, Exocer said:

It appears as though once people get the TAE they disappear, never to be found again

 

Not disappeared, still here and very much interested in all the ways folks are advancing the state of the art!  As we've all seen along this journey, each mountain top is a chance to see the next possible peak to climb.  I'm definitely again in climbing mode, but too soon to say what climbing paths and peaks are worth digging into.

 

[austinpop]

15 minutes ago, Exocer said:

@austinpop , I enjoyed your write-up very much and look forward to your network tweaks testing with the Mutec REF10 SE120. While I know I will never own a TAE (I have to put my child through college first 😄) I will live vicariously through you and the other owners. Please, do keep contributing to this thread. It wouldn't be the same without ya ;). It appears as though once people get the TAE they disappear, never to be found again... I'm guessing listening takes up too much of their time.

 

Cheers

 

Yes, I realized that, and I didn't want to imply I would disappear! I still enjoy tweaking, and the network path is still an endless pit of optimization. I am realistic enough to know the journey is never over. As I mentioned in my post last night, the only area where I do NOT enjoy tweaking (other than soldering, a skill I mastered only briefly in college and quickly lost!) is messing with server builds, mobos, internal cabling, swapping parts, and the worst of all - those Molex connectors! My heart is always in my mouth every time I wrestle with the 8-pin EPS or 24-pin ATX connectors.  There's no logic to this — I am after all a computer engineer! Still, I know myself well enough to know which things I like to do for fun (swap components, external cables, PSUs, DDCs, etc) and which I don't (server builds). 

 

So rest assured — I'm not going anywhere! I will still be around, and contributing whenever I have something meaningful to share. I'm also super excited to see folks like @Nenon and others contributing their knowledge and experimentation here!

[Exocer]

7 minutes ago, ray-dude said:

 

Not disappeared, still here and very much interested in all the ways folks are advancing the state of the art!  As we've all seen along this journey, each mountain top is a chance to see the next possible peak to climb.  I'm definitely again in climbing mode, but too soon to say what climbing paths and peaks are worth digging into.

 

Very much looking forward to your continued contributions @ray-dude and @austinpop!

[ASRMichael]

@audiopop with a heavy heart, congratulations! I sense a huge amount of jealousy from myself as I write this post! 
👍
 

 

[JoeWhip]

Another great example of the KISS principle in action. Congrats!

[Dev]

I agree completely on the KISS principle. While I never heard an Extreme, I recently heard a Aurender W20SE (similarly priced or maybe less) and the level of realism and naturalism makes my DIY builds sound like a toy. The problem is once you hear, its extremely difficult to un-hear it. They just get ingrained in your mind. I am starting to realize that the well designed single box commercial server is a route that I will need to venture sooner than later.

 

@austinpop Congrats on the Extreme in these extreme times! Its the right step forward.

[ASRMichael]

I think Rajiv raises a good point on how much can be spent on DIY Server & Extras. Quick Calculation...Now I’ve added everything including network, because an Extreme would still sound better without all the money I’ve spent on extras, (spaghetti) 

 

Motherboard - £500

CPU - £500

RAM - £200

Case - £300

PF USB Card - £1800

Ethernet Card - £500

2 x SJ LPS + cables £7500

Storage - £1000

Symposium Footers X 4 £600

Symposium shelf - £750

EtherRegen £600

SOM - £350

Pink Faun CPU & Chipset clocks £3500

Probably a few more items I can’t think of now! 

 

This comes to £19,000 ($25000)  If i include what I’ve bought & sold in last 3 years on my journey, I bet I wouldn’t be far off an Extreme! 
 

Do I regret this? Yes & No, the yes, why? I could of had a better sounding system if choose a different purchase route. The No, why? I have really enjoyed the journey to get to where I am. Enjoyment in life tends to cost money no matter what you do these days, like hobbies (I appreciate this DIY is an expensive hobby). 
 

Would I now buy an Extreme? No, simply because I can’t afford it. Also, I’ve got to the stage where I am 99.9% satisfied with what I’ve got. In the future? Maybe I’ll buy a Extreme model 3 in 10 years! In the meantime I’m going to start listening than fiddling! 

 

[BigAlMc]

13 hours ago, austinpop said:

So I'll let you in on a secret. I hate spaghetti.  The spaghetti was never the goal. SQ was the goal. Spaghetti was only the means to an end, which was unavailable with "conventional" digital gear. But if you give me a conventional piece of gear with endgame SQ that needs no add-ons, external PSUs and clocks, I'll shed that stuff in a heartbeat.

 

Hey Rajiv,

 

Congrats on your sexy new purchase. Pretty jealous dude!

 

But, you know that spaghetti is like, well a string of spaghetti and is a wave! It comes and goes. You simplify and breathe a sigh of relief. And then you start adding the latest gizmo's. Granted those gizmo's are going to need to be darn good to add anything to the Extreme. But the day will come. And we all look forward to hearing about and sharing those endeavours!

 

13 hours ago, austinpop said:

 

Then it was off to the spreadsheet to tally up all the bits and bobs I could sell off, and I nearly fell off my chair.

 

Not nearly the same scale as you but I'd a similar experience. Was looking at the Innuos Phoenix and discovered PS Audio had new M1200 amps out. Didn't think I could justify both. And then realised just how many items I had to offset it. Not quite broken even (and false accounting when you include shipping and PayPal fees) but pretty much covered the cost by selling items I was removing or had already removed.

 

Sorry didn't mean to hijack your point but your argument that the cost of spaghetti accumulates far more than you realise really resonates.

 

13 hours ago, austinpop said:

And hark! Is that a thundering herd of Buffalo headed my way?

 

Here comes the spaghetti!! 😄

 

Congrats again on the purchase. Don't be shy about posting listening impressions. I know that many will enjoy them (and salivate over them) even tho we've already enjoyed Ray and Roys descriptions.

 

Cheers,

Alan

 

 

 

[Johnseye]

I seriously hope the Extreme is the beginning of a truly well thought out and executed music server platform that can be followed by other companies in the future. The engineering,. attention to detail and design of the server is what the future should hold as a standard. 

 

Most of us don't have the means to build something of such high quality but we all try in what ways we can. If more companies learn from Taiko, innovating, improving, generating competition and mass producing we should begin to see more devices like this in the future. Of course we can always continue to build our own or tweak. 

[lmitche]

Too bad to be losing another DIYer. It was (mostly) fun while it lasted.