Hi Marty,
There is a lot of history behind this. We embarked on a custom USB driver project back in august 2020 already. Initially this was fuelled by the desire to have a universal USB driver as, running a Windows Operating System required the installation of a driver for each individual DAC and as the Extreme was selling in much higher then anticipated numbers this was creating a substantial support load. This is not an issue you have with a Linux operating system, likely one of the reasons most servers are Linux based, as you then have a standard driver which can drive virtually every DAC already. There is also a generic Windows driver, but we have removed it from the OS as, it being generic, is not optimal, and there is a very noticeable difference in sound quality if the DAC is being driven by a driver tailored to its specific USB implementation. This subsequently implies that the USB implementation differs amongst DAC makers, which it does. On top of that these drivers are created to work reliably on every windows computer, be it new, old, slow, fast, bloated with software, short on memory, etc.
So began the effort of developing a driver capable of driving multiple USB implementations, but we also embarked on the TAS project, where we developed a software player and the USB card project with its associated controller and firmware development. Combined this led to an avalanche of discoveries on what influences sound quality in what way, as each of these developments contained a lot of trial & error listening to different pieces of code, software, firmware and hardware interaction. A lot of this often made no sense at all and had us scratching our heads for months. However if you just keep running different experiments and meticulously document the results it eventually starts to make sense and you start finding answers.
So what we just released is the culmination of 18 months of research & development, where the USB driver and accompanied Operating System and software playback optimizations turned into something entirely different then what its original intend was. The USB profiles are there to optimize the Roon playback software to USB driver interface, for TAS the USB4 profile is always technically superior although personal preference could lead to you preferring a different profile, interesting in itself as technically optimal does not always translate directly into user preferred. The USB driver itself now automatically adjusts to the different DAC/Vendor specific USB implementations. We can now also rather quickly identify errors in DAC USB implementations which we can compensate for in the USB driver, as some of our customers have already noticed as we implemented a few corrections for specific DAC brands already this week (I'm shying away from naming these brands, hope you don't mind).
A few remarks I'd like to make are that 1) imho it's somewhat unfair to now label TAS as the underdog as a part of TAS is now integrated into the USB driver so Roon can take advantage of it. So when you are running Roon, you are listening to a piece of TAS as well, and it would not sound this good without. 2) This USB driver and accompanying Operating System environment are very specific to the Extreme, it does not run reliably, nor does it even give you the same sound quality benefits, on other hardware and software. We can therefor not port it to the Sound Galleries branded 2015/EVO models, nor can we make it available to the DIY world. Early in this post I mentioned that the Vendor supplied USB drivers are designed to run reliably on every windows computer, that does not apply at all to our USB driver and it even does some things which are generally considered to be technically impossible.
While at it I might as well address another part of the update which has sparked some discussion being the network side of things. Similar to the USB driver project this has quite some history, we have started working on designing a switch even earlier, in april 2020, with the first well working prototype finished at the start of 2021. We did choose to not release this switch as it did not actually solve the "problem" beyond just "sounding better". A second iteration which was finished in June 2021 and marked the first time we managed to achieve better sound quality with the network connected over disconnected. This led to new insights of how networking influences sound quality, and we realised that this could be partially addressed in software, but could not be fully solved in software alone. We also realised that what we were doing was simply the wrong approach. Obviously we could have just released that switch, and I'm sure everybody would have been very pleased with its performance, but it would still not address all the variables, and would still be susceptible to external influences. What we are looking at is a ISP <-> modem/router <-> interconnect <-> switch <-> interconnect <-> network card <-> operating system interaction, every individual part of which effecting the resultant sound (intentionally leaving out quality here). The audiophile way is to just replace as much of all of that as possible with pieces designed with sound quality in mind. The variables become almost infinite and significantly worse then the variables surrounding the server <-> DAC interface. I can tell you we have a full solution on the way now. Part of the software solution is in this update. The by now 4th iteration of the "switch" (it's actually no longer really a switch, but we'll keep the details to ourselves till we can start shipping) and the accompanying network card can hopefully start shipping just after the Munich high-end show in May. The "hopefully" here is due to the current global supply shortage situation. This is a vastly superior solution to what we are working with today which I would label as a "Band-Aid". These will again only work well with the Extreme and be therefor only available to Extreme owners. However we will also release a Router near the end of this year which will work for and be available to everybody, though Extreme owners will be served first. The reason why we will make this available to everybody is a matter of pricing, the amount of engineering going into this router turns this into a 7 figure development cost project on its own, next to a sizeable layout and parts count and cost, this means it would become very expensive if we would make it exclusive to Extreme owners. Will you still need that switch with that, for Extreme owners the answer is yes, for non Extreme owners probably no, the why will become evident when we launch.
Circling back to today and this past weeks update, you now have, implemented in software, very high resilience against varying network traffic / load. What you also have is a much lower noise floor in general, which will expose more of what you priory did with tweaking your network. Often tweaks to your network which sounded better to you, actually diminish technical performance. You will get rock solid technical performance with standard network cabling, designed to do the job its supposed to do, and a standard switch which could be necessary if the ports on your router/modem are not switched or inferior by other means. Routers/modems are often designed to be as cheap as possible being sold in large quantity to heavily competing Internet Service Providers who often pick the cheapest thing doing the job to be able to offer the cheapest possible internet subscription. This all does not imply that your audiophile grade switch is inferior, it may very well enhance performance, but you should be aware that some of these cut transfer speeds considerable, we've seen up to 90% reductions in transfer speed and some even cause packet losses which are in fact highly unusual in a small home network environment. On top of that some apply clever noise modulations which may sound better in systems where that is masked by your front-end noise floor. We do therefor strongly recommend to re-evaluate your network setup using basic non audiophile network components as a reference. If your audiophile switch or cable does sound better to you, great. If it diminishes performance now, you have an expensive component sitting there lowering your performance..
