Good morning!
We anticipated this release to generate a large number of questions and we understand there's a lot to digest here.
What we are releasing now is the practical implementation of both the BPS (Battery Power Supply) and the new interface XDMI (Extreme Direct Music Interface), formerly announced as TACDA/TACDD, but renamed to XDMI as it bears similarities with our XDMS (Extreme Direct Music Server) software project, being a more direct, or purist if you will, approach to processing "bits".
The ultimate goal here is to eliminate digital noise caused by processing digital signals for which we need a combination of software and hardware solutions as those two are more intertwined then one may realise. Developing the software and firmware of the XDMI project for example was an even larger effort then designing the hardware part, I would estimate this to about 65% of the total design effort and therefor the largest contributor to the cost of the project. The BPS, or rather BMS (Battery Management System) also runs firmware, and is remote controllable by IOS/Android APP. Although in this case the hardware design part was a larger effort then the software part, this still took considerable effort.
As audiophiles we are accustomed to paying for physical boxes. Software is largely invisible, all you see is an interface or settings app on the remote device you already own and it weighs 0.0 pounds. Yet, with music servers it's a paramount part of the performance, although the hardware ultimately determines your performance ceiling, I'd be inclined to claim that the software is more important, as your beautiful overengineered shiny piece of hardware can simply perform terrible when driven improperly. But on top of that the sonical impact of actual code can simply be huge, and compete with hardware upgrades. For those who doubt that statement I'd like to refer you to our customer feedback on this forum on the OS update we released on 11/22/23 and currently on the "NSM" code change to our XDMS playback software suite.
I like sharing information, I'm regularly being told I'm oversharing, and I'm now going to share a number which perhaps I shouldn't, but I think it helps you to understand how much of an effort is actually being put into software. We have crossed the 30.000 hour mark for TAS/XDMS/XDMI/BMS, time spend on firmware and software coding, excluding time spend on support for the alpha/beta releases. I realise this to be an insane number, something to keep in mind here is that a lot of coding is actually dismissed for sounding bad(!). Coding efficiency improves over time as we gain more understanding in what sounds good and what sounds bad, so part of this can be considered educational, and has in fact not been completely wasted as it has also led to actual hardware improvements, but nonetheless, it is a considerable effort from my perspective.
Circling back to our new product releases. We initially developed a "large" BPS to power the entire Extreme. This was designed to provide battery power for 20 hours of use with a 4 hour recharge window, which you could configure yourself by remote app, for example recharge between 4 and 8AM. A "problem" with that was it occupied about the same volume as an Extreme, so it needed to be an external chassis. To retain a low impedance, critical to it's performance, this needed low impedance connectors and a humongous 1 AWG(!) umbilical, but additionally intelligence to only conduct power in safe conditions, as a simple fuse would raise impedance too much resulting in the "muddy/slow" bass and muted dynamics we're accustomed to hearing with battery powered solutions. Additionally we needed to design new regulators (a new DC-DC power supply) to take full advantage of the potential benefits of this battery supply solution.
When we finished this design we were in the global parts shortage period in the aftermath of the pandemic and we couldn't release it as the lead-times of a large number of parts had increased to a year or even more. This is also what caused the delay of our network card and switch launch, some of you may recall the Intel ethernet chips taking over a year to arrive. Luckily the situation has improved considerably since then but it's still not back to before.
This delay gave us ample time to experiment with the BPS and we figured out that more was better then one. And in fact that separately powering individual peripherals provided some very considerable benefits. As these peripherals consume vastly less power then the server as a whole we started designing a "mini" BPS. Now mini may have been the wrong word as it's only "mini" in physical size next to the "large" BPS we developed before by having a lower amount of battery cells, 6 in stead of 30, but it's actually still quite a substantial supply, significantly larger then a linear power supply. The Extreme chassis can be modified to fit 2 of these new battery supplies, or one "old" large BPS, but this modification requires parts of it's chassis to be replaced, the bottom plate, rear plate, left side heatsink and several internal chassis parts. On top of that there are pretty strict safety requirements surrounding battery power supplies of this kind and therefor it will need to be shipped back, completely disassembled, re-assembled and certified. Doing the math on this it will exceed what you'd pay for trading in your Extreme towards the new Olympus, which is one of the main reasons for us to offer it, there are some more reasons but we'll elaborate on that in a later post. In effect it's the new "single box BPS Extreme". The Olympus is also 1" deeper allowing us to mount 3 in stead of 2 internal battery supplies, and even then it is still a more cost effective solution then rebuilding your Extreme.
As part of the XDMI project we have developed interface cards to be able to be able to mount the entirety of the XDMI interface inside a DAC eliminating the disadvantages of currently existing interface options. We were able to modify these to be able to mount any PCIe card in a remote enclosure without the drawbacks of already existing "PCIe expanders" which normally impact performance too much to be useable for this purpose. This enabled us with the option to simply move peripheral cards to an outside chassis. Hence the birth of the Olympus I/O, containing 2 battery supplies separately powering your network card and USB card or XDMI cards with the additional benefit of operating in a reduced EMI/RFI environment. This solution is slightly more cost effective then trading up your Extreme to the Olympus, but takes up more shelf space.
