Taiko Audio SGM Extreme : the Crème de la Crème

Abyss Man · Apr 28, 2020

Just updated new FW update on Eunhasu after the Roon update and it sounds really good now. Was it coincidence? I’m not an Extreme user though, just sharing here. Sorry if I’m intruding.

Kingsrule · Apr 28, 2020

So I did some looking around into Roon settings and the DSD Playback Strategy selection of NATIVE is now gone for my MSB ASIO device

What is going on?
Also JPlay is crashing...

Kingsrule · Apr 28, 2020

Figured it out..if u select a specific MSB device in Roon, the Roon setting for that device screws everything up.....

Select unidentified device and sonics back to awesome....

Kris · Apr 28, 2020

nuway said:
I believe it would be better disable auto update feature in the future until we can hear feedback from Emile

This makes a great sense.
Few more days with older version is not going to change anything .
But updating not so good version makes many unhappy

austinpop · Apr 28, 2020

I'm reminded of the "sport" of curling. Roon is the bloated, heavy stone always veering off course, and Emile is the Olympic gold medalist "guy with the broom/brush," bringing it back on course, without ever touching the stone.

Of course, this whole post is accompanied by a big

nonesup · Apr 28, 2020

Hi Emile. If an Extreme buyer solicited the Minimserver installation, would that be possible?

Taiko Audio · Apr 28, 2020

Not a bad idea to delay updates until "approved".

Taiko Audio · Apr 28, 2020

nonesup said:
Hi Emile. If an Extreme buyer solicited the Minimserver installation, would that be possible?

Well that would take quite some time to optimise.

paul79 · Apr 28, 2020

I do not follow the ROON forums. Do they catch wind of this?

oldmustang · Apr 28, 2020

Well, to chime in with what others are saying, I hear a noticeable improvement in emotional involvement, not to mention deep bass articulation, dimensionality and presence with Emile's changes to the operating system. The fun and immersion in music is definitely back. I ended up listening late into the evening last night and loved every minute of it.

Thanks so much, Emile!

Steve Z

Ackcheng · Apr 28, 2020

Steve Williams said:
All I can say is how lucky we are to have such a mind and creativity of Emile

I haven't been listening much since the new Roon update until last night before I caught up with this thread until last night.I have several demo tracks that I use to check updates. Last night something just didn't sound right to me. I was emotionally unattached to what I was hearing and didn't think much about it until I read the above posts.

Emile did my update in all of 5 minutes and I have been listening for the past 20 minutes and this is indeed a more pleasurable sound to my ears. Too soon to make definitive comments other than to say the music sounds so much more natural.For me there was more involvement as well as a feeling of presence.

I am planning on a long listening session now as this sounds so much better

Kudos to Emile

Dear Steve,
I am also a new Extreme user. Do Extreme automatically update the firmware itself. Or would it prompted me to contact Emile? My new extreme is only in my place for a week and is still burning in. But I accidentally updated the Roon and wonder what to do now

oldmustang · Apr 28, 2020

paul79 said:
I do not follow the ROON forums. Do they catch wind of this?

Generally on the Roon forums when someone mentions sound quality the Roon Police and fanboys quickly tamp down the thread. I get the sense, though there haven't been any explict statements by the actual Roon developers, that while they are concerned with the sound quality of their product to a point, it is not their primary focus and they view sound quality complaints with a certain measure of bemused tolerance.

Steve

austinpop · Apr 28, 2020

oldmustang said:
Generally on the Roon forums when someone mentions sound quality the Roon Police and fanboys quickly tamp down the thread.
Steve

No kidding! I have endured that myself, and eventually left in disgust.

nonesup · Apr 28, 2020

When I had Lumin A1, I had a membership for a year, to compare it to Minimserver. Great music database manager, but far worse than Minimserver in SQ. I did not renew the subscription.

Taiko Audio · Apr 28, 2020

Ackcheng said:
Dear Steve,
I am also a new Extreme user. Do Extreme automatically update the firmware itself. Or would it prompted me to contact Emile? My new extreme is only in my place for a week and is still burning in. But I accidentally updated the Roon and wonder what to do now

E-mail us at contact@taikoaudio.com and we’ll take care of that.

matthias · Apr 28, 2020

romaz said:
The people at Roon have done a great job as far as user experience and feature set but Roon has become so bloated with code that it has also become its own worst enemy. If you look on the Roon forum, people over there seem hung up on features. No one talks about SQ as if Roon has no role to play here. Some people still believe that with bit-perfect playback, it's just a bunch of 1s and 0s and that playback software could not possibly impact SQ.

For some time now, in my DIY builds, I have been incapable of getting Roon to sound as good as other players. In fact, with regards to SQ, it is probably at the bottom of the pile. Not just Audirvana but also Stylus, JRiver, LMS/Squeezebox, Foobar, etc., have the potential to sound better than Roon. In comparison to Euphony's Stylus, which was my previous reference player, Roon sounded bloated and lacked control and precision leading to considerable overhang. For orchestral music with complex instrument lines, Roon can sound atrocious and no matter what OS I chose or what fiddling I did, I could never get it to sound as good as Stylus. That is until the Extreme. Somehow, Emile figured out how to tame Roon and so it has been a pleasure to enjoy Roon's superior user interface while also enjoying even better SQ than I was getting from Stylus and others.

+1
At the moment I enjoy Audirvana on a Mac platform. As I do only streaming from Qobuz this UI of Audirvana 3.5 is perfect for me and I do not have any wishes to go to Roon.
So I am wondering what Emile could achieve when optimising maybe Audirvana for Windows on the Extreme or the upcoming Extreme Mini.
Is there a chance that maybe Audirvana on an Extreme could sound even better than Roon on an Extreme?

Matt

pleroma · Apr 28, 2020

romaz said:
I completely agree. The people at Roon have done a great job as far as user experience and feature set but Roon has become so bloated with code that it has also become its own worst enemy. If you look on the Roon forum, people over there seem hung up on features. No one talks about SQ as if Roon has no role to play here. Some people still believe that with bit-perfect playback, it's just a bunch of 1s and 0s and that playback software could not possibly impact SQ.

For some time now, in my DIY builds, I have been incapable of getting Roon to sound as good as other players. In fact, with regards to SQ, it is probably at the bottom of the pile. Not just Audirvana but also Stylus, JRiver, LMS/Squeezebox, Foobar, etc., have the potential to sound better than Roon. In comparison to Euphony's Stylus, which was my previous reference player, Roon sounded bloated and lacked control and precision leading to considerable overhang. For orchestral music with complex instrument lines, Roon can sound atrocious and no matter what OS I chose or what fiddling I did, I could never get it to sound as good as Stylus. That is until the Extreme. Somehow, Emile figured out how to tame Roon and so it has been a pleasure to enjoy Roon's superior user interface while also enjoying even better SQ than I was getting from Stylus and others.

This is encouraging to hear Roy. Regarding Roon, I have to say that early on I was disappointed with their support for classical tag issues, but I had some sympathy with them, being an IT person myself, as Mike (I assume the owner) said he was in the process of doubling his support staff. I found it better to message support people directly instead of using the forums. And btw, I ended up using a slight hack, putting the composer name in "last, first" format in the artist tag, and making sure the sort settings for artist are "first name" (along with an interesting explanation from them as to why that works). Their customized classical metadata support is limited at best.

kennyb123 · Apr 28, 2020

Interesting timing on the comments here about Roon's sound quality. Just a few days ago I switched over to the Squeezebox music player (sans Roon) on my Innuos Zenith. It really disappointed me to hear how much better it sounded. My exact words to friends yesterday: "I think it would behoove me to at some point switch to a different server that aims to make Roon a priority."

I will begin saving for the upcoming Extreme mini starting today.

onlychild · Apr 28, 2020

oldmustang said:
Well, to chime in with what others are saying, I hear a noticeable improvement in emotional involvement, not to mention deep bass articulation, dimensionality and presence with Emile's changes to the operating system. The fun and immersion in music is definitely back. I ended up listening late into the evening last night and loved every minute of it.

Thanks so much, Emile!

Steve Z

I listened for about 30 mins last night after the Roon update and then just went to sleep thinking I was not getting "involved" with the music because I was probably tired.

Emile applied the update this morning and I haven't stopped listening since. Within the first minute I could tell things were different and noticeably better, mostly in deep bass and emotional involvement.

When I owned the Innuos Statement, running Roon through squeezebox was the best sound I could get out of the Statement by a large margin over Roon direct. The issue with running roon using squeezebox on the Statement was all the bugs. You couldn't skip to next track or previous track without the thing going crazy. You couldn't jump to the middle of a song or listen to a passage again that you just heard without Roon just stopping the music and having to start over again. It changed the way I listened to music. Very annoying, especially after shelling out $15K for the statement.

I found a work around where anytime I skipped to the next track, I also skipped forward a few seconds on the time bar. This got me through it and once I heard it from the squeeze box player, I couldn't go back to regular roon anyways. Well after 5-6 months, there was still no fix for all the bugs using Squeezebox player through Roon on the Statement.

The fact that Emile is so quick to fix/improve anything that he does not believe is up the Extreme's extreme SQ, to me, is worth the price of admission in and of itself.

When the mini Extreme finally comes out, and if its priced around the same as the Statement, other manufactures are really going to have to up their game if they want to compete in the "high end" server market ($10K to $15K) because its not just about hardware with servers but also software optimizations.

P.S. I consider the Extreme to be in the "uber high end" server market.

I also hope that this level of service and attention to detail does not go away when Emile is selling mini extremes like N95 masks. : )

kennyb123 · Apr 28, 2020

onlychild said:
When I owned the Innuos Statement, running Roon through squeezebox was the best sound I could get out of the Statement by a large margin over Roon direct. The issue with running roon using squeezebox on the Statement was all the bugs. You couldn't skip to next track or previous track without the thing going crazy. You couldn't jump to the middle of a song or listen to a passage again that you just heard without Roon just stopping the music and having to start over again. It changed the way I listened to music. Very annoying, especially after shelling out $15K for the statement.

Very annoying indeed. At the end of last November, Nuno from Innuos installed a newer build of this "Experimental mode" onto my Zenith. It is more stable than what's now included in the their current release (1.4.3), but still glitchy. I really don't know where things stand with that presently, but I can't imagine how I would have felt to have shelled out $15K and then had to suffer though that experience. It's my understanding that Innuos is developing their own music player, so I'm not so sure how committed they'll be to Roon ongoing.

onlychild said:
When the mini Extreme finally comes out, and if its priced around the same as the Statement, other manufactures are really going to have to up their game if they want to compete in the "high end" server market ($10K to $15K) because its not just about hardware with servers but also software optimizations.

I agree.

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