SGM Taiko Extreme

[EuroDriver]

The Taiko Extreme does indeed bring digital streaming and saved digital files to SQ performance levels that Emile and I never imagined could be possible even 18 months ago.

 

I have had the experience of listen to an decent quality 16/44 track played back on the Extreme and it sounded like a master tape.  How and when is level of digital SQ playback possible ?

 

The major factors are

 - RF Emissions shaping

 - Vibration control

 - reduction of music correlated distortion / noise

 

These advances have been made possible by developing and engineering the Extreme on a system which has the Total DAC D12 Mk2 with its incredible low noise floor, and the Audionet Stern and Heisenberg Pre and Monoblocs.  This ultra low noise combination has allowed Emile to clearly detect small sonic differences which on other systems could hardly be detectable and then one would not be sure which was sounding better.  When you sum up 30 to 40 of these small differences then the SQ Delta becomes a big jump.

 

Some of the variations are actually counterintuitive, but repeated testing consistently delivered positive results in the Extreme Server, low noise electronics, high transparency system context.  An example of where shaped random noise helps dramatically to improve SQ is adding shaped dither to a digital mix of 2 digital PCM streams.  You can find dither demo's on YouTube

 

With vibration, the surprise takeaway is that digital electronics are just as vibration sensitive as analog electronics, so attention and engineering applied to vibration control is essential to achieve "extreme performance"

 

The industrial grade RAM is extremely expensive and has to be custom ordered but it has very audibly better performance which we believe is due to lower vibration sensitivity than standard RAM.  Before you rush out to order industrial RAM, the optimization of RAM speed, refresh rates is comparable to tuning a concert grand, only possible by ear, but when you hit the sweet spot, the music sings.

 

I need to stop here, before i give away too much of Emile's IP.  Emile has left pretty much no stone un-turned in chassis design, server board data channel architecture, OS stripping /optimization, CPU core process allocation, latency optimization and vibration management

 

The other good news as Emile has delivered many Extremes World wide which then have been hooked up to many different DAC's and systems, the elevation of the customer's system sonics has been consistent in character and difference, a lot of happy customers

[EuroDriver]

On Mike's system, his Studer Master tape running 1/2 inch tapes at 15 ips was the clear sonic champ.  The sound at Mike's is glorious and gorgeous.

 

In Hengelo we have great electronics low noise electronics, but mikey mouse speakers in comparison to Mike's MM7's.  In Hengelo, Redbook sounds like a Master Tape in it's information density 

[EuroDriver]

On 11/7/2019 at 1:27 PM, marce said:

What is RF emission shaping?

 

Each and every clock in a digital device is a source of RF emissions.  The frequency and amplitude of these clock emissions are modulated by

 - power supply fluctuations

 - vibrations

 

These RF emissions can be attenuated but they still get everywhere, through the air, piggy backing off the AC supply cables, piggy backing on network cabling

 

Random modulation of clock emissions are not so harmful, tape noise does not kill the sound of a master tape.  However music signal correlated noise is harmful and needs to be managed to be less harmful.

 

Why do CD transports have a hard time competing with SOTA Music Servers ? It's the vibrations coming off the CD drive.  Really good CD transports look like turntables for a reason, vibration control

 

You can do a test with a perfectly optically isolated DAC, you do things to the music PC, and you can hear it

[EuroDriver]

20 hours ago, Nenon said:

 

Sorry, if it is not clear I am an end consumer / DIY-er in some cases , not an industry manufacturer/designer/engineer. I don't own precise measurement equipment, just some basic ones.

 

What I said is that upgraded upstream clocks sound better in my system. I don't believe that the only clock that matters with asynchronous signal is the one on the DAC, because that contradicts my experience. I have not heard a DAC that is completely immune to upstream clock changes. Rajiv's review on the DCS DAC was interesting. I have never tried a DCS DAC or the top of the line MSB DACs. But with the other dozen of DACs I have tried, I can clearly hear audible difference when making changes to the upstream clocks. 

 

When it comes to digital sources, I have tested every product that has piqued my interest. That includes streamers like the microRendu, ultraRendu, sms-200, Allo DigiOne Signature Player. It also includes PCIe cards like the JCAT USB card, PinkFaun USB Bridge, PinkFaun I2S Bridge, SOTM USB card, etc. It includes quite a few different motherboards, CPUs, RAM, power supplies, etc. 

 

After testing all that, I like the sound of the PinkFaun I2S card with ultraOCXO clock and Sean Jacobs DC3 LPS the best of all in my system. However, it is clear that this is DAC dependent. Other implementations (i.e. USB, upsampling, etc.) work better on some DACs. So I always look at the entire chain from the file you play all the way to the analog conversion as one complex system and how software, hardware, and everything in between interracts together. 

 

But back to asynchronous tests with USB cards - a PinkFaun USB bridge with ultra OCXO clock installed sounds a lot better in my system (with all the DACs I have tried) than the same PinkFaun USB bridge without the ultra OCXO clock. Also their lower class OCXO clock installed on the same card sounds different. It's literally a matter of removing the ultra OCXO clock and putting the lower class OCXO clock, so that test eliminates a lot of questionable variables and leaves the clock as the only significant change in the system. That to me is a proof that the clocks upstream of the DAC make some kind of a difference. I have no respect of the manufacturers (at least of the DACs I have tried) who claim the contrary. To me, it is clear that they have no idea what they are talking about. 

 

Lastly, I have no desire to argue with anyone here, neither have the time for this. And I especially try to avoid arguments with people with 5-digit posts. Sorry, I have more important things to do in my life. Those discussions have been had many times in these forums and are not useful to anyone. No matter what you measure and what you say, you will not change my opinion. And I will not try to change yours. So let's move on and talk about the Extreme server, which has a state of the art engineering for this time. I would really like to have the opportunity to listen to one myself. 

 

Hi Nenon,

 

Think of each clock like a radio transmitter with a carrier wave at the clock frequency.  Vibration causes frequency modulation, power supply fluctuations result in amplitude modulation.  RF emissions in the MHz to GHz range are very hard to stop, they get everywhere