I have to say that this is far and away the most customer beneficial business model I’ve ever seen. I’m not even a product user but my admiration for what Emile and Taiko team are achieving is ‘Extremely’ high . For most, near all I’m guessing, the Extreme you bought is not at all the same as the Extreme you now own. The Extreme was the best Roon player on the planet.
If you‘d stayed with Roon there’s a good chance that aural supremacy would dwindle as other SW music players evolved mainly in the direction of music quality, and not with bundles of new , computer-resource-requiring features that contribute nothing to sound quality improvements.
Now you have an Extreme optimized for use with TAS, an operating system and resource allocation that ensure that all key processes have all the quality DC and processing power they need, ensuring that the process flows effortlessly with no unnecessary stops and starts and perfect timing where its required. Essentially it seems that the Extreme + TAS is the first piece of equipment on the planet that can dig out an almost perfect music stream from a completely unoptimized network to produce a close to perfect musical USB stream and present it perfectly to the DAC, cable notwithstanding. At the start, it required an uber excellent network as Roon didn’t have the capability to dig out and improve the signal to the degree that what’s presented to the DAC is almost perfect, but now with TAS, a custom driver and the new USB board, the perfect network has become unnecessary. That’s quite a massive improvement to the Extreme’s value proposition, given that a genuinely fully optimized network will set you back almost as much as an Extreme....but even a Roon based Extreme with the finest network still wouldn’t outperform a TAS - based system. That’s value for money given that all its cost is a new USB board. Quite remarkable in this day and age
