Taiko Audio SGM Extreme : the Crème de la Crème

rando

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Sep 22, 2019
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Can you further elaborate on this intiguing analogy ?

Are you not by this point familiar with the meaning of tough sledding - setting your own often uncharted course - across your chosen fields of exploration? :)

Recent forcible acquisition of a classical music service comes to mind as an upstart selling goods that garnered more appeal than could be tolerated expanding. Good development and aims ? delivered into obscurity with hardly an AP bulletin to note them being swept off the landscape. Happens enough there just isn't much out there anymore.

I feel this explanation lost the thread of desired context. Progress where no path is obvious comes in ways few reading in a journal quite relive.
 
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Steve Williams

Site Founder, Site Owner, Administrator
I'm struggling to hold back a joke about effects of C-states (Steve W.) and P-states (Portland is very much in a state of its own :p ).


Among seasoned company of any stripe the habitual outlook is this that or the next problem takes as long as it takes. Years behind can flop to years ahead and right back in the near term. WBF encompasses a range of pursuits this applies to.

It's all well and good to make obscene claims out of the crowd of know-it-all's. Writing a custom BIOS that boots still lies some ways off from refined solutions a manufacturer will be proud to support, and defend. At that level bringing together firmware and software without playing an international shell game of patches is tough sledding. Very little lies in this barren ground where corporations abandoned small holdings to bring everyone into their own fortresses.
I'm struggling to understand what the heck you just said????
 

kswanson27

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Nov 21, 2018
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oldmustang

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Dec 1, 2012
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A couple decades back I wrote a spec and UI for a player app. Two years of development and it wasn’t complete when I left the company. And it was a very simple UI in many ways mimicking iTunes. I am surprised to hear the amount of coding for each “view” or “page” is greater than expected—something I might have said as a new program manager. Not what I’d have expected from team Taiko — but it is really amazing the levels of effort to get some of the simplest functionality to work, then add multiple operating systems, foundation for localization, just fitting the pieces together. Is no easy thing making an elegant and functional bit of software. Oh yes, and it must not F-up the sound!

Keep at it team Taiko — we are all pulling for you (Some more patient than others.)

Now stop with the silly “sleep” thing and get back to work! :p
To adapt a meme used elsewhere -- The first 90% of the coding takes 90% of the allotted time. The last 10% takes the other 90%.

Steve Z
 

Blue58

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Jan 20, 2013
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Alpha <<< Beta < release
That's been my experience.
Post #8000 suggested beta may be skipped entirely and a fully working version would be released. Something I look forward to, no bugs, no instability, no weekly/monthly updates.

Here‘s hoping for a Xmas release.
 

MOTU

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Oct 17, 2019
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Just got the XDMS alpha installed. Holy cow! Must be the single biggest upgrade to the system so far. It's not a veil that's been lifted it's a freaking blanket!

Also the interface is super snappy, no waiting after pressing a button, as it should be in the 2020s.
 

Taiko Audio

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Feb 10, 2017
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Should we set up a separate thread to discuss XDMS alpha?

Nice idea but perhaps better suited for a further advanced version. The coding team is fully aware of what functionality works and what doesn't at this stage. It would be more productive to let them spend their time on coding rather then on reading "bug reports" :)
 

Taiko Audio

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The question I have regarding the single chassis version is...will any human being be able to lift it onto their shelf? I had to rent a lift to get the current Extreme onto the top shelf of my rack. Seriously!!

Also, adding ~8 inches in height might make this a difficult space/rack issue for many. I know it It would literally be impossible for me so the 2 chassis option is the most attractive from my perspective.

It would be 28mm / 1.1 inches deeper and 20mm / 0.8 inches taller. It would indeed become significantly heavier, but also significantly "cheaper".
 
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EuroDriver

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Nice idea but perhaps better suited for a further advanced version. The coding team is fully aware of what functionality works and what doesn't at this stage. It would be more productive to let them spend their time on coding rather then on reading "bug reports" :)
On our Team, is Meri our QC/QA Lady

Time to give her a shoutout. I have never come across such a meticulous and detailed person in the QA/QC field.

She even finds bugs in the content streams from our streaming integrator. She is currently benchmarking the response times of the 2.0 App against the 1.0 App
 

dminches

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Oct 22, 2011
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Nice idea but perhaps better suited for a further advanced version. The coding team is fully aware of what functionality works and what doesn't at this stage. It would be more productive to let them spend their time on coding rather then on reading "bug reports" :)

Agreed. I was thinking the thread would just be for users, not the team. We can all wait for that and just enjoy what we have for now.
 

Christiaan Punter

Well-Known Member
The reports on XDMS sonic quality from the two Steves really, really whet the appetite. Congratulations Team Taiko on achieving this most important goal (and with hints that it will only get better).

I do have a question about gapless playback. I'm guessing that I speak for a good number of Extreme owners when I say that gapless is and always has been a critically important priority for any state of the art music player. I'm surprised that the Alpha version is not quite there when it comes to gapless. Given how important this is, it suggests that you are struggling with how to achieve true gapless playback and still maintain the desired level of sonic quality. Can Christian or Ed or Emile shed any light on this issue and what we can expect in the coming months? Thank you in advance for any feedback on this issue.
The gaps are the consequence of the chosen playback architecture and they cannot currently be removed without seriously sacrificing the sound quality. But we are acutely aware of the importance of this feature. And as Ed mentioned:

"Concert Mode is currenly less than one second, and we will make it carefully shorter and shorter without impacting sound quality. Our top priority is to furnish all the rooms (completing the current functionality) and then we will turn our attention to making the gap smaller and smaller. That's a promise".
 

Steve Williams

Site Founder, Site Owner, Administrator
The question I have regarding the single chassis version is...will any human being be able to lift it onto their shelf? I had to rent a lift to get the current Extreme onto the top shelf of my rack. Seriously!!

Also, adding ~8 inches in height might make this a difficult space/rack issue for many. I know it It would literally be impossible for me so the 2 chassis option is the most attractive from my perspective.

View attachment 97869
your calculations are incorrect
 

Steve Williams

Site Founder, Site Owner, Administrator
It would be 28mm / 1.1 inches deeper and 20mm / 0.8 inches taller. It would indeed become significantly heavier, but also significantly "cheaper".
I missed this....so yes it is far from an 8" difference

This change would still fit on my CMS platforms, so if it is significantly cheaper and the measurements won't change I'm in for a one box solution. I like saving money.

I also noticed Emile's comment that the price of parts has skyrocketed and there will soon be an inevitable 25% price increase in the unit. so if it were 2 boxes it could indeed become insanely expensive
 

Tuckia

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Jun 3, 2019
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To adapt a meme used elsewhere -- The first 90% of the coding takes 90% of the allotted time. The last 10% takes the other 90%.

Steve Z
Development efforts have risks without guarantees. As proof of your statement, my wife's employer initiated a project to develop their own proprietary software with an initial budget of $10M. After expenses hit the $70M mark they abandoned the project with nothing usable. Consider that less than $5M was in hardware cost, the rest, about $65M was all coding cost. At least someone did well on the project. The perils of T&M contracts.

My daughter is in art school :rolleyes:
 

rando

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Sep 22, 2019
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Does the alpha version of XDMS support playing file names in chinese/japanese/Korean? If not I will not hold up the queue by joining it and not being able to use it…

:cool:


@Steve Williams

I will continue chipping away at your question. The reasonably comprehensible American English (for younger generations) below is a formative example of a musical P-State as it was depicted in my message you quoted last night. State of artistic expression at some point observed in Portland that leaked into musical naming conventions.

Graphically a rather simplified one if I'm perfectly honest about the state of digital creativity that will unavoidably be encountered going forwards. Your forum software fails to display this correctly when published (reasonable behavior for adult discussions). So I'm attaching a screenshot.


˜”?*°•.˜”*°• ??s?? ?? •°*”˜.•°*”˜ ?? ?

1663164252997.png

2015, this had dying relevance in 2015. Why would it still be years away from breaking into the conscious awareness of anyone designing a forward looking player program slated to be released in 2023? Correctly displaying characters encountered regardless of users native language or musical disposition is well within reasonable bounds of a GUI. If it exists it does not perform to the level of a high end audio app(liance).
 

cat6man

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Feb 6, 2013
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The gaps are the consequence of the chosen playback architecture and they cannot currently be removed without seriously sacrificing the sound quality. But we are acutely aware of the importance of this feature. And as Ed mentioned:

"Concert Mode is currenly less than one second, and we will make it carefully shorter and shorter without impacting sound quality. Our top priority is to furnish all the rooms (completing the current functionality) and then we will turn our attention to making the gap smaller and smaller. That's a promise".

Is the gap situation similar for local vs. streaming?
 

pleroma

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Jul 7, 2018
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The gaps are the consequence of the chosen playback architecture and they cannot currently be removed without seriously sacrificing the sound quality. But we are acutely aware of the importance of this feature. And as Ed mentioned:

"Concert Mode is currenly less than one second, and we will make it carefully shorter and shorter without impacting sound quality. Our top priority is to furnish all the rooms (completing the current functionality) and then we will turn our attention to making the gap smaller and smaller. That's a promise".

Hoping my new Extreme will ship with XDMS Alpha (as requested), I'm considering a tool to concatenate tracks in the library, temporarily resolving this for some must-have music (not saying this will work for everyone).
 
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