Top-end audiophiles will buy anything I guess....

[Rilot]

I just spotted this:

SGM Extreme Music Server – Taiko Audio

Let's break it down. It's an "audiophile-grade" PC for music streaming and digital playback.

Some highlights from the blurb:

"The choice to design a dual CPU system was for a large part fuelled by finding a way around the impact Roons luxury interface has on sound quality. It does enable Roon processing to become virtually inaudible, a world’s first in our experience."

"4x faster than SSD which results in lower latency and much lower system noise overall, giving you black backgrounds, huge space rendition and brings an ease to the musicians performance, only matched by the very best vinyl and tape playback systems."

"Our custom RAM modules have factory pre-selected A-grade memory modules, all dimm components (memory chips, capacitors, resistors etc) are matched to within a 1% tolerance and selected for low current draw."

And the price for this masterpiece of sound quality? €24,000

It's a PC for god's sake! Stick a top-end DAC in any off-the-shelf PC and it will sound the same.

 

[Yaayuh!]

LOL

Deserves to be in here: https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/t...-retreating-from-the-hi-fi-industry.18887952/

 

[hornetstinger]

It's a very well designed pc but do you need 48gb ram and 10 core for music streaming,? Nope

 

[dlockers]

It's a very well designed pc but do you need 48gb ram and 10 core for music streaming,? Nope

It also starts at 25 grand

 

[hornetstinger]

It also starts at 25 grand

Hmmm

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[Hawk Tuah]

It's looks like a nicely designed passively cooled PC. But damn, they aren't messing around with the price.

I wonder how low they've had to clock those Xeons to stop it turning into a toaster.

 

[NickK]

Hehe. You'll need silver recovered from werewolves and wrapped in unicorn skin for the AC power lead then. Don't forget the audiofool unobtainium NOS fuse.

What people don't realise is that for DSD playback all you need is a few transistors, a couple of inductors and a couple of capacitors - basically it's an averaging filter. Probably put together something for less than £20 with known branded parts. The fun is getting the bits in regular timing to 'de-jitter' at 24MHz (DSD512) which adds the cost. A nifty streamer PC is useful for that song streamed from memory with an i7 for example but someone is having a laugh.
Probably a cheaper option is to make a custom FPGA with DDR memory attached that your program downloads the song over USB into and then the FPGA then streams the song without the PC doing anything, it can then stream it far higher precision with regard to jitter thus sound quality.

 

[hornetstinger]

The company should be reported though

 

[NickK]

The company should be reported though

That would be slippery slope in the audio world..

 

[Armageus]

I imagine the ECC ram for that dual Xeon board will be great for latency

Looks to be this motherboard I think:

WS C621E SAGE｜Motherboards｜ASUS United Kingdom

ASUS Pro Workstation motherboards are designed for professionals in AI training, deep learning, animation, or 3D rendering. Featuring expandable graphics, storage, impressive connectivity and reliability, Pro Workstation motherboards are the ideal solution for creative professionals and IT...

www.asus.com

I wonder how low they've had to clock those Xeons to stop it turning into a toaster.

It will likely be Dual Xeon Gold 5215 which are 85W 10 Core/ 20 Thread parts - 2.5Ghz base / 3.4Ghz boost parts (or very similar)

 

[hornetstinger]

I guess reading flac files really requires high read rate pci-e nvme is needed eh

 

[dlockers]

Hmmm

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I'm not 100% up to date on my computers but pretty certain that thing has 6 grands worth of graphics cards before you've even got going . It is also two fully bonafide computers in a single case.

 

[theone8181]

So when they say sad is slow, they're just using something nvme speed. There's no end to this type of stuff in the audio world.

 

[Feek]

giving you black backgrounds

I always want black backgrounds when I’m listening to music.

What a load of tosh. Give ‘em coathanger wires for their speakers and most of these pretentious idiots can’t tell the difference between them and monster cables.

 

[mid_gen]

I imagine the ECC ram for that dual Xeon board will be great for latency

Looks to be this motherboard I think:

WS C621E SAGE｜Motherboards｜ASUS United Kingdom

ASUS Pro Workstation motherboards are designed for professionals in AI training, deep learning, animation, or 3D rendering. Featuring expandable graphics, storage, impressive connectivity and reliability, Pro Workstation motherboards are the ideal solution for creative professionals and IT...

www.asus.com

It will likely be Dual Xeon Gold 5215 which are 85W 10 Core/ 20 Thread parts - 2.5Ghz base / 3.4Ghz boost parts (or very similar)

To be fair....there is probably a miniscule argument to be made that ECC ram would avoid the tiny possibility of bit flipping. Not that anyone would ever notice!

 

[bloodiedathame]

Most modern music is recorded onto an iMac or made on a bog-standard laptop with Fruity Loops. Stuff that was recorded analog should be kept as analog as possible. That said, my last two releases were Pro Tools, then wav's to a guy making a vinyl master, then vinyl pressed.

 

[dlockers]

To be fair....there is probably a miniscule argument to be made that ECC ram would avoid the tiny possibility of bit flipping. Not that anyone would ever notice!

Completely unlistenable!

 

[Rroff]

Uh? optical to an external DAC which has a ground loop isolated power supply? which pretty much covers everything this claims to do.

 

[hornetstinger]

You mean I don't need 6000gb per second read rate for music and that normal ram isn't accurate enough?

 

[Hawk Tuah]

Uh? optical to an external DAC which has a ground loop isolated power supply? which pretty much covers everything this claims to do.

This doesn't even include a DAC. Or at least they include a DAC in things you need to get started.