With the greatest of respect to everyone here can I please just ask everyone to play nicely otherwise I’ll have to keep you all in at playtime and tell your parents when they come to collect you…
This is a wonderful hobby / addiction that we all have and we all have our own ways of enjoying it - I understand that in some places there are even still people that drag a needle across a piece of plastic!
As an attempt to interpose a “Look! Squirrel” moment have you seen this real-time Artemis re-entry video - it’s really quite something…
Speaking of physics (weren’t we?), please can we not regurgitate the digital bits-is-bits thing as if it’s all that’s going on? I’d be extremely disappointed if anyone here thought there was digital magic going on which might affect sound quality. in eg the timing or “shape” of the bits inside those ethernet frames/packets. I’m with @Anupc on this, there is simply no mechanism.
When we get into the bitstream (or whatever the post-streamer-conversion data is best called), it’s a different domain entirely. And too many people, including too many manufacturers, extrapolate from this domain to ethernet without really understanding why the extrapolation is invalid.
Having said that, we also know that in audio there is stuff (noise) going on too; in purely digital terms, the concept of any network switch doing anything sonically is complete nonsense, but in the real world then even a budget switch can make a clearly audible difference if installed say 0.5m of Cat cable from a streamer. The bits coming into and out of the switch are all present and correct, but the whole signal is still audibly better (in most systems in most rooms and to most ears etc etc, pick your own caveats).
If a Taiko thingie is touted as lower noise than a Taiko wotsit, fair play, there may be something going on which genuinely can affect sound quality. If any claims are focused on the purely ethernet side (including clocking, er, misunderstandings) then let’s call it for what it is.
While it’s all a bit of a confusing mess, it does seem this new Server has options for an internal DAC, which I suppose could potentially justify some of the costs, if done properly.
€86,200!!! (Sorry, not enough exclamation marks, I wore my keyboard out). Still, look at the intro discount, which will obviously tip the odd waverer over the line.
The trouble with internal DACs is… well, let’s just say it’s unlikely to be a dCS DAC
add on…just read at whats best hifi forum that Taiko is in discsussion with dCS (and Lampi) already…would be interesting to know what they’re talking about
For 80K I would start first with a Rossini+Clock or a (almost) Vivaldi+Clock+Upsampler.
Then…if you want…you can see what the additional 80 can provide you. Of course I would look to putting that 80k to different use - say a nice DarTZeel 8550 integrated + a pair of speakers…and most likely have some change left over
I get a few people a day “opening a line of communication with” me. The line usually goes dead pretty quickly.
That’s not the same as “in discussions with” in my book, but you can see all too easily how such rumours get started and get traction.
I notice that the discussion around factors with a negative impact on SQ in streaming systems almost always focus on noise being introduced through the physical copper connection.
Moving to an optical Ethernet transmission using SFP modules in the DAC would likely not only defeat all possible arguments about the benefit of exotic servers or streamers, but might also bring actual improvements in SQ.
Nigel has unveiled what’s truly behind the curtain - a claimed better product is being touted that is simply better because the designer has “fixed” problems in the existing design. Yet, for both marketing and competitive reasons, they won’t reveal anything. Transparency is not a hallmark of this industry. So, we’re all left to see if the hype is real and applicable in any way to our own systems, each different in its own environmental setting. Bits may be bits. But there’s so much more a system has to deal with. A designer of a single “link in the chain” can only do so much in solving the myriad complexities associated with a product. And in digital, aside from the media source, the player, as with a vinyl player, is where things can go wrong - and fast.
