SGM Taiko Extreme

[marslo]

10 hours ago, bmichels said:

I had last year the chance to have a home demo of the SGM 2015 server, which indeed use HQPlayer to upsample everything to high DSD rates.  I Was impressed by the sound, but since I am not fan of upsampling I did not purchased it and got a W20 who does play bit perfect.  

 

Now I am very interested by isquirrel's writing "The new Taiko Extreme does not upsample".  This is a major strategic change to the SGM !   Therefore I am again interested in this new server... expecially after reading isquirrel's listening impressions.

 

question: is HQplayer not used anymore ?  HQplayer was a major foundation of the SGM package... and also a source of complexity of set-up/installation to optimize the SGM because of the myriad of choices/parameters/filters available through  HQplayer. 

I have had the same impression after the audition of  SGM 2015 with HQ Player and T+A DAC 8 DSD at Geoffrey's Sound Gallery a few years ago .

I am also in favor of native files be it dsd or SM pcm so I keep my W20 for the sound and functionality.

I had also the home demo by Lukasz Domanski of LDMS which was very promissing, both in usb and RJ 45 connection.

I like very much the idea implemented in Taiko Extreme to transmit to the DAC the files in their native form to reduce the noise due the heavy transcoding and upsampling by HQ Player. The idea to make the transport " as simple as possible but not simpler " is also behind Jplay and W20 solutions , I started my computer playback journey with Jplay which excelled in  hibernate mode .

It would be very interessting to compare LDMS and Taiko Extreme as the price level of Taiko is rather prohibitive.