Introducing Olympus & Olympus I/O - A new perspective on modern music playback
- Thread starter Taiko Audio
- Start date
While patiently waiting for my "new to me" Extreme, I've been using my Chord 2go /Hugo 2 as my source. I say this from experience, avoid m connect. It's terrible and that's the paid version. Connection issues, random drop outs. Don't get me started on their queue system. I hope others have better luck but just wanted to give a warning.
Well, being number 55 on the list, I am very heartened to see this! So, how far in advance does the Taiko team reach out to finalize all aspects of the delivery and get final payment set? I've yet to hear a peep.
WAHOO! IT has arrived!
The FedEx driver was nice enough to help me get in the front door.
I'll have some help here Monday to get it in the rack.
The FedEx driver was nice enough to help me get in the front door.
I'll have some help here Monday to get it in the rack.
...heavy little monster, isn't it @aLLeARS ? I had to move it from the garage up the stairs and onto a dolly myself. Then I sat down for a coffee! And texted some muscle for hire! I am up and streaming via USB for now.
We’re waiting for I/O chassis to arrive as we had to reject last week’s I/O shipment, due to the recent change where we’re going to be less strict following queue numbers we are now shipping Olympus servers with higher order numbers already as we have finished those anyway. You would normally be invoiced when the I/Os have arrived. If you want to pay earlier that’s fine ofcourse, just reach out to support.
We have a fulltime employee now ( @JulienVermeiren ) JUST for shipping, and a standard work week doesn’t cut it…
We more or less will have to, it’s not allowed to discuss politics on this forum, but the reason why should be obvious. We do have a second anodiser now, a really significant amount of people switched to black, the only remaining issue is our staff shortage, more job interviews next week, fingers crossed, maximum effort!
The Olympus + I/O / XDMI native / Lampizator Horizon is exhibited by Dream Audio at the “finest audio show Vienna” this weekend for anyone interested.
Main floor
Room nr. 0.14
Main floor
Room nr. 0.14
All very much appreciated! Looking forward to receiving #120 Olympus/IO.
Julien was of great help in following up and providing updates on the shipping of my unit. Great choice!
@JulienVermeiren is a great addition to your team! I needed to delay my shipment by a few days due to travel, and Julien managed that process perfectly. Of course the weak link in all of this is FedEx, where delivery either goes as smooth as silk, or all hell breaks loose.
My unit (#37) arrived yesterday in 2 days from NL, but my local FedEx team seems to be nonplussed how to deliver it to me. They suggested I come pick it up (with my back, no thanks!) The issue here seems to be the unit was sent to the FedEx EXPRESS distribution center, not the FedEx FREIGHT distribution center.
I'm sure they will sort it out early next week, but every FedEx issue seems to be unique, suggesting the company has issues with their "last mile" delivery infrastructure. Sadly, there does not seem to be an alternative, as UPS and DHL are equally bad.
if you ever want a first class courier shipping try World Courier , expensive, sure, but every time I used them it was well worth it...sure stuff goes wrong with them too, but they care about resolving issues and getting shipments delivered.
Not dedicated as in audio-only ISP. I use Starlink as the ISP for my entire home and segregate the audio-only behind the Taiko router/switch/DCD combination.
Steve Z
You'll have to put your Olympus on the rack back-to-front then to admire that combo (which I agree, looks great)That copper on BLACK is simply sweet!
Steve Z
If I found an Olympus on the street, I think I could muster the strength to pick it up and run with it. Where there is a will…
I don't want to interrupt the on-going discussion about logistics for something as mundane as a few comments about sound quality, but here goes.
Regarding Olympus and PGGB files. I've been doing some comparisons of PGGB-processed tracks to original 44.1 tracks with my Olympus/XDMI analog daughter card. I've got quite a few hours on each, having them installed and playing Roon Radio 24/7 since delivery, with a few short periods to swap cards and play XDMI SPDIF to my Vivaldi. As stated before, the Vivaldi APEX DAC and Clock are for sale (the Cybershaft OP-21 reference clock is sold). So Olympus/XDMI analog is my way forward for now.
First off, I'm not hearing the dire SQ drops I was expecting as sample rate/file size goes up. But, in some formats I'm not hearing the SQ improvements touted in the past for high bit rates either.
I've been running the comparisons using 12 44.1 tracks I've ripped from CDs and with which I am very familiar. At least 7 of these tracks are music that wasn't treated very well by the original mastering from analog to digital or perhaps were recorded digitally to begin with. The other 5 are just things I really like and are recorded well enough, because I can only stand so much A/B B/A listening before I start to lose the will to go on living. So they are some blessed relief and enjoyment from the testing.
The challenging-to-listen-to tracks all get fatiguing because of harshness, brash or forward sound, edginess, flat perspective or all of the above. What I've come to refer to as typical digital nasties. These nasties are particularly irritating to me when they are associated with vocals.
So I have looked to PGGB in the past (pre-Olympus) to help tame or ameliorate these problems, at least to the point of making the tracks easier to sit through if not downright enjoyable.
PGGB Plus as the public release is called had been a big improvement in terms of its success rate at improving digital music for me on Extreme. Not everything can be completely helped (some things are truly wretched in their original form) but almost always DSD files produced by PGGB have made listening much more enjoyable.
That hasn't changed. I am not going to convert my entire music library to DSD512. Really great sounding albums in 44.1/48 or 88.2/96 kHz PCM format with Olympus don't seem to need the help of PGGB DSD and SQ improvements if any are pretty small and to me, not worth the time or the penalty in disk space to worry about.
However, those less the stellar sounding original files very definitely benefit from conversion to DSD and the magnitude of improvement in lack of grain, naturalness, and importantly in reduction or outright removal of edginess and harshness goes up as the bit rate goes up.
So these comparisons wouldn't take forever (reference: will to live) I compared originals to DSD128 and DSD512 and skipped DSD256. Whether the deltas would be even larger were Olympus not sensitive to processor load is moot point -- I have no way of knowing that. Suffice to say, for me DSD processing is worthwhile for my problem tracks and albums and I will continue to use PGGB at DSD512x1 to do so.
High bit rate PCM is interesting. I decided to cut right to the chase and instead of producing several test folders of upsampled/remastered test tracks at increasing bit rates, I went directly to 32 bit 705.6/768 as a best case/worst case test.
While I found high bit rate PCM did make improvements to certain non-problem attributes such as longer decay tails, increased ambience and air, a great sense of ease, etc the reduction in edginess and harshness if it was present in the original was less, in some cases much less than with PGGB DSD.
Plus, while I hear the DSD-processed tracks as very full-bodied with saturated tonal colors and lots of natural texture, in comparison high rate PCM sounds lighter, almost thinner and not nearly as vivid.
So, I offer this as an additional data point for those using or contemplating using PGGB with library files with their Olympus and Olympus I/O.
Steve Z
Regarding Olympus and PGGB files. I've been doing some comparisons of PGGB-processed tracks to original 44.1 tracks with my Olympus/XDMI analog daughter card. I've got quite a few hours on each, having them installed and playing Roon Radio 24/7 since delivery, with a few short periods to swap cards and play XDMI SPDIF to my Vivaldi. As stated before, the Vivaldi APEX DAC and Clock are for sale (the Cybershaft OP-21 reference clock is sold). So Olympus/XDMI analog is my way forward for now.
First off, I'm not hearing the dire SQ drops I was expecting as sample rate/file size goes up. But, in some formats I'm not hearing the SQ improvements touted in the past for high bit rates either.
I've been running the comparisons using 12 44.1 tracks I've ripped from CDs and with which I am very familiar. At least 7 of these tracks are music that wasn't treated very well by the original mastering from analog to digital or perhaps were recorded digitally to begin with. The other 5 are just things I really like and are recorded well enough, because I can only stand so much A/B B/A listening before I start to lose the will to go on living. So they are some blessed relief and enjoyment from the testing.
The challenging-to-listen-to tracks all get fatiguing because of harshness, brash or forward sound, edginess, flat perspective or all of the above. What I've come to refer to as typical digital nasties. These nasties are particularly irritating to me when they are associated with vocals.
So I have looked to PGGB in the past (pre-Olympus) to help tame or ameliorate these problems, at least to the point of making the tracks easier to sit through if not downright enjoyable.
PGGB Plus as the public release is called had been a big improvement in terms of its success rate at improving digital music for me on Extreme. Not everything can be completely helped (some things are truly wretched in their original form) but almost always DSD files produced by PGGB have made listening much more enjoyable.
That hasn't changed. I am not going to convert my entire music library to DSD512. Really great sounding albums in 44.1/48 or 88.2/96 kHz PCM format with Olympus don't seem to need the help of PGGB DSD and SQ improvements if any are pretty small and to me, not worth the time or the penalty in disk space to worry about.
However, those less the stellar sounding original files very definitely benefit from conversion to DSD and the magnitude of improvement in lack of grain, naturalness, and importantly in reduction or outright removal of edginess and harshness goes up as the bit rate goes up.
So these comparisons wouldn't take forever (reference: will to live) I compared originals to DSD128 and DSD512 and skipped DSD256. Whether the deltas would be even larger were Olympus not sensitive to processor load is moot point -- I have no way of knowing that. Suffice to say, for me DSD processing is worthwhile for my problem tracks and albums and I will continue to use PGGB at DSD512x1 to do so.
High bit rate PCM is interesting. I decided to cut right to the chase and instead of producing several test folders of upsampled/remastered test tracks at increasing bit rates, I went directly to 32 bit 705.6/768 as a best case/worst case test.
While I found high bit rate PCM did make improvements to certain non-problem attributes such as longer decay tails, increased ambience and air, a great sense of ease, etc the reduction in edginess and harshness if it was present in the original was less, in some cases much less than with PGGB DSD.
Plus, while I hear the DSD-processed tracks as very full-bodied with saturated tonal colors and lots of natural texture, in comparison high rate PCM sounds lighter, almost thinner and not nearly as vivid.
So, I offer this as an additional data point for those using or contemplating using PGGB with library files with their Olympus and Olympus I/O.
Steve Z
"Where there is a will" -
there's normally money...
Don't hurt your back.. Hire someone.
I've had the O-I/O for close to two weeks now. I'm not going to get into the sound quality yet (yes its great and getting better), as I'm finding that things are still breaking in with the XDMI digital AES out, but wanted to add a quick note on the packing and set up of the O-I/O."Where there is a will" -
there's normally money...
Don't hurt your back.. Hire someone.
1. Unpacking and setting up on my rack. Agree about the "don't hurt your back" advice from RUIN*ish. I hired my trusted moving outfit (3 guys) to bring the crates to my home, unpack and set up on my rack. Everything was perfectly packed. No damage. Nothing was missing. Well done Taiko.
2. Setting system up. It took a little over an hour to unpack and connect the O-I/O, and get it up and running, including connecting ROON and to the NAS. Music started playing without any glitches. Thumbs up Taiko team!
3. Couldn't connect initially with the BPS app to the battery through Bluetooth. But after some help from Christian P, and clarification about the minor effect on sound quality during charging, I left the defaults in place (charging takes place from 12pm to 7am) and haven't worried about it at all since. The system is always well within the voltage limits without having to give it a thought. Another thumbs up for the Taiko team!
All in all, a painless and quick set up. And haven't had any glitches since. Great job Taiko!
I'm going to swap out the I/O cards out next week to try out the XDMI analog out. And will report back - but apparently it may take a while for the analog card to settle. We shall see. But I'm encouraged by Old Mustang's findings relative to his dCs system.
Mine was delivered to the middle of my driveway (look out the window “I wonder what that is”). I literally had to summon this will
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