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Taiko Audio SGM Extreme: WTF?

PipHelix

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Maybe everyone has known about this for ages—in which case please delete this—but why on earth is there such a thing as the Taiko Audio SGM Extreme? There are definitely things in our world that should be overbuilt—skyscrapers, bridges, tunnels, seawalls, homes and buildings in flood and earthquake prone areas, power grids, child safety seats, bike helmets, etc. etc.—but a music server?

For a mere €23,370.00 – €28,920.00/$28,216.00 - $34,920.00 you can have a “a State of the Art Music Server designed to deliver the most realistic sounding / live reproduction from stored music files and streaming music from Qobuz and Tidal.”

https://taikoaudio.com/taiko-2020/product/sgm-extreme-high-end-music-server/

I get that in our world there are very wealthy people for whom money is not a consideration and that there are people who make money off of them. Maybe it’s an honest living stealing from the rich and whatnot. But on a technological level, what justifies the price of this item? And how could anyone believe that a device can make Qobuz and Tidal sound like live music?

Is this just chicanery and dishonesty on the utmost level?

Of course there’s someone who bought, tested, and reviewed the piece and loves it and swears his listening life has been changed forever by it. A write-up in 5 parts no less:

https://audiophilestyle.com/ca/revi...the-taiko-audio-sgm-extreme-part-1-of-5-r907/
 

JustJones

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At least it does what it claims, it's a server/streamer. Worth it? Not to me, it is overkill for the purpose.
 

dfuller

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Holy crap, now THAT is snake oil.

"All data and software storage is non SSD" they say, while using no less than two m.2 SSD riser cards. Oy...

Also, the linear power supply junk is just... so stupid. Not only is the performance no better than a good switcher (and like, good PC switchers are very good - we're talking 31mV for the 12V rail at full rated load - ATX spec is 4x that), it burns a ton of power (and makes the whole room hot, never mind all the other stuff), but also motherboards have switching DC-DC converters right on them - like, that's what a VRM is. It's a buck converter (multiphase, but... whatever, not relevant here).

Admittedly I will give them some credit, there are no moving parts in here so it will be totally silent - but it's still about $27,000 too expensive, as well as dramatic overkill (on what planet does a music streamer need 20 cores of Xeon and 48GB of RAM?). You can do this with any half-decent ITX case, a low power quad core Ryzen, and a few m.2 SSDs.
 
OP
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PipHelix

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Holy crap, now THAT is snake oil.

"All data and software storage is non SSD" they say, while using no less than two m.2 SSD riser cards. Oy...

Also, the linear power supply junk is just... so stupid. Not only is the performance no better than a good switcher (and like, good PC switchers are very good - we're talking 31mV for the 12V rail at full rated load - ATX spec is 4x that), it burns a ton of power (and makes the whole room hot, never mind all the other stuff), but also motherboards have switching DC-DC converters right on them - like, that's what a VRM is. It's a buck converter (multiphase, but... whatever, not relevant here).

Admittedly I will give them some credit, there are no moving parts in here so it will be totally silent - but it's still about $27,000 too expensive, as well as dramatic overkill (on what planet does a music streamer need 20 cores of Xeon and 48GB of RAM?). You can do this with any half-decent ITX case, a low power quad core Ryzen, and a few m.2 SSDs.

Yeah, this streamer looks like it’s more or less military grade in terms of build and in terms of wasteful expenditures. 48GB of RAM....I imagine one could build quite a gaming PC with that!
 

JeffS7444

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Windows 10 Enterprise? Surely no extremophile will want less than Server 2019 Datacenter at a modest $5250 to cover the 20 total CPU cores.
 

Jinjuku

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Here's one of my servers: HPE Gen7 Proliant DL360e. The server with 24GB of RAM was $155 shipped.
2 Xeon L5640 (total of 32 logical cores)
128GB ECC DDR3 10600 RAM ($120)
8 TB of storageRAID 5 ($300)
480GB Kinston SSD Boot Drive ($55)
4 GBe Copper Ethernet
2 10GBe LC SR Ethernet ($20 for the card, $18 for the 10GBe transceiver)
1 Lights out management Ethernet. This is a great feature BTW.

My total cost was $668. Able to hit 668MB/s between servers (I have a 2nd DL360e and a Dell R620) and my HPE Z420 workstation. I can get 332MB/s to my lowly Celeron N3150 based systems (100% silent machines BTW).

IMG_20210302_225919

IMG_20210302_224720

IMG_20210302_224728

IMG_20210302_224747
 

pma

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Maybe everyone has known about this for ages—in which case please delete this—but why on earth is there such a thing as the Taiko Audio SGM Extreme?

At least it is nicely built. They seem to use heat pipes for cooling?

If there is someone who wants to spend his money for a thing like this, it is his choice, no need to criticize. The other one may feel free to buy his $50 component. I would not like to live in the world when someone dictates what I may buy or not, though the world seems to turn in this direction.
 

voodooless

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If there is someone who wants to spend his money for a thing like this, it is his choice, no need to criticize.

Actually, there is a LOT to criticize (note that these questions are not directed to you):

The choice to design a dual CPU system was for a large part fuelled by finding a way around the impact Roons luxury interface has on sound quality. It does enable Roon processing to become virtually inaudible, a world’s first in our experience.

Care to elaborate? Have any data to back this up?

In our research we found SSD storage to be a big bottleneck for the overall performance of a digital source. An SSD always connects to your system via the motherboard DMI chipset. For the Extreme we are using PCIe modules, which connect directly to the CPU and bypasses the DMI.

Those are also SSD, and they are industry standard by now for all but the lowest budget stuff. This is just disingenuous.

Therefore we achieve speeds up to 4x faster than SSD which results in lower latency and much lower system noise overall, giving you black backgrounds, huge space rendition and brings an ease to the musicians performance, only matched by the very best vinyl and tape playback systems.

Care to elaborate? Have any data to back this up? Compare lower noise with tape and vinyl :facepalm:

Ever heard of DRAM refresh? You should, because it is one of the main resons why many think fewer and lower speed DIMMs are better for sound qualiity. In our research we discovered the true source of why RAM has such a big impact on sonics

Care to elaborate? Have any data to back this up?

we focused on providing the lowest latency possible for every instruction or set of instuctions the server has to manage.

Why? To maintain as short a queue depth as possible in all system components, which lead to a constant current draw, low EMI/RFI emissions and powerline pollution.

Do I need to repeat myself?

The heavy top for example hosts a total of 6.000 machined holes. These holes are “waveguides” which attenuate emissions by 81 dB which is around 10.000 times!

That's not the holes doing that, but the aluminium of the top. The wholes are just small enough to not let any EMI though.. Your microwave also has that in its window.
 

Koeitje

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Mnyb

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Did not Archimagos blog covered this some years ago he loaded a PC almost 100% with some cpu and ram intense task and compared to an idling PC with just the audio player . And measured where it actually counts the analog side of the DAC (where no tweaker go to check his PC tweaks for some reason) And it was the same as expected :)

The fun part is that is a step further removed as it a server for Roon or other music server software and the endpoint (player ) sits on your LAN somewhere and have the boring property that as long the server is somehow able to fill its buffer it will work and work the same regardless. And if it cant deliver the data to fill the buffer you get a break or a glitch . not veils or lost microdetails .

Most network players have a substantial buffer .
What you can test is to simply remove the Ethernet cable and quickly put it back while playing , that would be the ultimate "silent server" not even connected to a network . It has been done .
And Amir did it for the network switch test with predictable results
 

Frank Dernie

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Built for ignorant suckers who believe vinyl and tape is superior to digital.

I have no problem with determinedly ignorant people being fleeced of their money
 

Jinjuku

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At least it is nicely built. They seem to use heat pipes for cooling?

If there is someone who wants to spend his money for a thing like this, it is his choice, no need to criticize. The other one may feel free to buy his $50 component. I would not like to live in the world when someone dictates what I may buy or not, though the world seems to turn in this direction.

Agreed. Buy what you want. I just wanted to show others what you can do if you have a reasonable budget you want to throw at a whole home server. I run all my VM's on this box, it's my pfSense firwall/router/black-hole DNS/IDS-IPS, it's my DNS server, it's my VPN server, it's my multi-tenant RDP server, it's my GNS server, it's my VM server running my WiFi controller, some Ubuntu WS and Server VM's.

And it's hardly breaking a sweat.
 

FrantzM

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Hi

Those are run-of-the-mill prices for the High-End Audio crowd. This particular brand and model has received good reviews and command attention for reasons sociologists will have to study. The reality is that these offer no perceptible or objective advantage over a streamer that would cost less than $1000.
So that you have an idea how extreme and expensive these things can be here is a picture of the dCS Vivaldi, from their web site, it consists of a DAC ($35,999.oo) , a Transport ($41,999.oo, this is just a deck that spins CD or SACD, it only spins it , it doesn't perform digital to analog conversion, it only spins the discs, did I say that it only spins the discs ? ), an upsampler ($21,999.oo Which UPsample the digits to ... but does nothing else, is not a DAC either it only ... upsamples) and a Master Clock ($14,999.oo)... When you have the complete Vivaldi stack then you have this:
1614786925247.png


It will cost you around $115,000.oo and you will have to believe that you are listening to the best digital Audio possible... :rolleyes:

Then you learn that, under level matched and blind conditions any PC + a RME AD, sound exactly the same and you ...:mad: @#$%W^^#&! ing' and #@$%%!^hit ... for a while .... then some people on the Internet, among them, some tin-eared young person able to hear 20 KHz , tell you that it is 99.999% likely that you may not even be able to hear the differences between this stack and an Apple dongle costing $9.oo ... Your reply with vehemence that measurements do not tell the whole story because you heard the differences, and it was "night and day"...

Peace
 

Jinjuku

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Get this. PeterSt posted a pic of a silent Xeon based system that you would place in room directly connected to a DAC. I pointed out Miska's approach (and JRiver does this too) were you do all the processing server side and send it to an endpoint. DNLA, NAA, what ever.

His response and I kid you not:

Me: You don't need a 32 core Xeon connected directly to a DAC. You need it sitting in a rack somewhere doing all the heavy DSP and/or ASRC and sending that out to an endpoint.

Him: You appear to have no clue. The DSP stuff doesn't happen there. You also seem to think I work from theory only.

And this guy is some sort of 'in the biz' person? He's a hack. He's running a Xeon at 500MHz! LOL dear god.
 
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