Article: Reality Quest: Going to Extremes with the Taiko Audio SGM Extreme (Part 3 of 5)

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3 hours ago, ray-dude said:

 

Very much so!  HQPlayer does all the good things that we love about HQPlayer. At least for my prefered settings (detailed in the HQPlayer section), Extreme barely breaks a sweat.  My demands on HQP are pretty modest though

HQPlayer does have very modest system demands for PCM but for SDM (DSD) the demands are much greater especially if one wishes to use the EC modulators. At DSD 256 using ASDM7EC there has to be at least two cores capable of running at 4.0 Ghz continuously. The filters can be distributed among multiple cores but the modulation needs to run on a single core per channel (all according to Jussi's posts that I have followed). I have not looked at the specs for the CPUs running here but if one wishes to use EC modulation at DSD 256 (anything higher like 512 EC is not possible right now as there is no CPU that can run at 8 Ghz) then it would be necessary to verify this capability.

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12 minutes ago, bbosler said:

 

"Conversion" was the wrong word. Maybe I know just enough to be dangerous, but USB was never designed with audio in mind, it is like ethernet where packets of data are sent with no real regard to timing. If the data file gets there intact it is a success.. don't really care when the packets get there, just that they do. On the other hand with audio it is all about timing which has led to various schemes to overcome the inherent problems with USB timing, like the asynchronous mode your Rossini uses. So you are correct, it is not converted, but broken into packets and sent that way. On the other hand spdif and AES are streams of data with embedded timing. Just seems like a better way to go than breaking down into packets then reassembling at the other end.

 

That said, perhaps the problems associated with overcoming timing issues with spdif are greater than those inherent with USB. I'm thinking with extremely stable clocking solutions like the Mutec REF10 to control the data transfer or what I would hope would be extremely stable clocks in a $26K server, that spdif might be a better solution.  So at this point I am officially in over my head, but given the extreme measures audiophiles are taking with USB (Sotm, ISO Regen, the new Innous, and others) I don't see where USB would be the goto solution to transfer data.

 

I now see the Dave will do 384K on BNC but only 96K on AES which is a bit odd, but realistically... is there any performance difference from upscaling to 768 you can transfer via USB vs  384 via BNC? That's a question, not a statement of fact,

 

Like I said, maybe know just enough to be dangerous, but 

 

 

 

 

The answers to all these questions is very long and detailed but can best be summed up by saying that everything in audio is a compromise. SPDIF/AES are legacy protocols with many issues to overcome and were not well designed in the beginning either. USB was not designed for audio. It is the Universal Serial Bus so it was designed to get all kinds of data into and out of computers. It replaced a bunch of really antiquated interfaces. In this day and age, if SPDIF comes out of a computer it likely has gone thru a USB data bus somewhere along the way. All the external format converters start with USB. Audio is not big enough to get teams of highly paid engineers working on on an interface just for high quality audio data transfer. We have to borrow from what is available.

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Ahh, I know what you mean about $26K Band-Aids. This has reminded me of English Lit class many many years ago (in a place far far away) and a book I had to read called "A Tale of Two Cities" by Charles Dickens. I know that this is cutting edge technology but I don't want to lose my head over it. I don't know what I would have to put on the chopping block to get one. But, it is a far better thing I will do today by ending this post.