Taiko Extreme - my experience

[manisandher]

I have a gorgeous Taiko Extreme in the house, on kind loan from the UK distributor, Kog Audio. I'll share my experiences here shortly (rather than get swamped in the large Taiko thread)...

Mani.

 

[the sound of Tao]

Deadly move Mani ... I admire your extreme fearlessness, may you pass through this test richer for the experience and not any poorer . Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

 

[manisandher]

Haha... Thank you.

Mani.

 

[EuroDriver]

Hi Mani,

Reach out to Emile, for sure he will have some interesting settings for the Phasure DAC

Best Regards

Edward

 

[manisandher]

Hi Ed,

Emile and I have already had a few calls and TeamView sessions. He's been stellar.

Unfortunately, the Phasure DAC only works with WASAPI (unless you use XXHighEnd, in which case Kernel Streaming is the preferred option). The lack of an ASIO driver for the DAC limits what we can try with the Extreme - certainly no NAA. But I'm currently using HQP Desktop and am getting very nice results with a number of filters, upsampling to 352.8/705.6.

More details soon...

Mani.

 

[manisandher]

Firstly, a massive thanks to Paul at Lounge Hifi (UK dealer) and Tim at Kog Audio (UK distributor) for arranging a home demo of the Extreme for me. I was expecting to get a few hours or so with the Extreme, but had it for pretty much a whole week. Awesome service!

Oh, and a massive thanks to Emile too who spent quite a while with me getting things set up as well as possible with my quirky DAC.

Right from the off, it was clear that the Extreme was like no other computer audio front end I had heard up to that point. It’s always hard trying to describe what one hears, but in the Extreme’s case, there are two things in particular.

The first is a real ‘solidity’ to the sound, something I’d never suspected I was missing. I realise now that every other computer front end up to this point has sounded slightly ‘hazy’ and ‘diffuse’ in comparison. The effect is fairly subtle, but once you’ve cottoned on to it, it’s hard to let it go.

The second is the explosive dynamics. Percussive instruments seem to have more force behind them, jumping out of the speakers. Transients have real attack behind them.

Hypothesising, I suspect both of these effects could due to a decrease in noise getting to and interfering with the DAC as it converts the bits into an analogue signal. (Although the bits themselves are actually analogue, of course .) Who knows how these things really work?

But it wasn’t all plain sailing. The Extreme seems to be as susceptible to the vagaries of network and USB setups as any other computer front end.

Connected directly to my bog-standard ethernet switch, playing from local storage sounded better than streaming from my music server or Tidal/Qobuz. Streaming added a bit of ‘glaze’ or ‘sheen’ to the sound, making it sound slightly more artificial.

I tried three USB cables in all. The first made the sound too ‘bright’ and ‘edgy’. The second dulled the sound too much. Only with my Lush^2 did things sound just right. (I would have tried the Lush^2 first, but it was a tad too short. I wasn’t going to move the Extreme, so I had to hang my DAC over the edge of its shelf to get the Lush^2 to fit.)

Roon sounded pretty good, but HQPlayer sounded better. I tried pretty much all of its filters up to the sinc filters, but couldn’t get sinc-M to work with the Extreme. I settled on poly-sinc-lp as pretty much as good as any other filter. My DAC uses eight BB PCM1704U-K chips, so I used the recommended NS5 noise shaper.

With everything set, I had a great weekend listening to music. On Monday morning, Tim came to collect the Extreme. Was I sad to see it go? Sure. It’s a thing of beauty and sounds amazing.

Anyway, I reconnected my trusty Phasure Mach III, and finally upgraded to the latest version of XXHighEnd (after a number of months of meaning to.) I’ve been using Roon pretty much exclusively for the last few months because I’ve been playing around with its DSP, so it was really nice to get back to XXHE, which I’ve been using (along with HQPlayer) for over 10 years now. And what can I say? XXHighEnd is simply the best software player I’ve ever heard. It can do things other software players can only dream of. Full stop. Period... IMHO of course.

Perhaps the Extreme really is the best computer front end on the planet. But even after the Extreme, listening to the Mach III with XXHighEnd, I'm still smiling .

Mani.

 

[Taiko Audio]

Oh, and a massive thanks to Emile too who spent quite a while with me getting things set up as well as possible with my quirky DAC.

Was my pleasure!

XXHighEnd is simply the best software player I’ve ever heard.

I'd agree to that when used with the Phasure DAC, probably even mandatory to use in conjunction for best performance. But otherwise it's an apples and oranges comparison IMHO, it would need to at least support ASIO and automatic sample rate switching to give other software a fair run, especially if you'd wanted to use it with the Extreme and take advantage of it's dual CPUs.

BTW, next time you use HQPlayer, try disabling dither (set to none), that may give you a more similar sound to XXHighend.