Hello Emile,
Many audiophiles in Hong Kong are eagerly waiting for a new Taiko Audio server which is cheaper than the Extreme and as good as/better than the discontinued EVO.
I know that it's in development.
Would you please disclose to WBF members a bit about it?
Many thanks!
Hi CK,
We do indeed have several prototype servers up and running. I will elaborate a bit on decision factors for our next model release which is as of yet undecided.
The Extreme has been more successful then we anticipated creating a demand our subcontractors are struggling to keep up with. Once you enter the realm of custom made parts beyond PCBs populated with "off the shelf" parts there are significant manufacturing lead times and costs involved. We do employ quite a few custom made boutique parts. The power transformers, filter chokes, capacitors, memory modules, wiring and even the PCB materials used are all non standard custom made.
Then there is longevity, we design and build our servers to last. Every component is subject to wear due to exposure to vibration and heat. We design for vibration resilience and low heat operation. Take a CPU for example, it can operate 24/7 at 70 degrees Celsius (160 Fahrenheit), but its performance may start degrading after just 2 years and completely fail after 5. You can keep it running cool by using fans, but fans have a vibration signature and create "low" frequency electrical noise which is quite harmful to midrange integrity. Furthermore fans degrade fairly rapidly leading to increased vibration and noise. There are several after market passive cooling solutions available, but they have limited cooling performance, they works just fine initially, but performance will degrade faster then desired for our purposes. Do note this is not a problem in the DIY world where people tend to swap their hardware components frequently. None of this is acceptable for us so we design our own passive cooling solutions. This comes with it's own challenges, interfacing to the CPU for example, our CPU coolers are CNC machined to a 5 micron tolerance, that is 0.005mm, note that a 100 micron ( 0.1mm) tolerance is already considered to be very good for CNC machining. We also use heatsinks machined from solid copper as it cools twice as good (fast) as aluminium. This increases life expectancy by at least 4 and up to 12 times over other solutions. The resulting low operation temperatures also increases sound quality. Our CPU's operate at between 35-50 degrees Celsius (95-120 F) depending on environment and load. This also means audio performance will persist over time. Interestingly we get enquiries from the OEM non audio industry on a regular basis to purchase our cooling solutions. But it's to costly for those markets. A big upside to all this is if we have a component failure, it will be early on, either in the initial stress test in our factory, or in the first few weeks of usage.
Last but not least there's the chassis. It is a very complex design, very machining intensive with around 6000 (!) holes, a lot of cut outs and difficult angles. Each chassis takes several days to machine. But after that it gets really tricky, the horror for every manufacturer, it needs to be shipped disassembled, finished and anodized. We have had anodizing and shipping companies destroying up to 70% of our CNC output. Ask any manufacturer, it's the biggest problem in the industry. We have that down to around 20% now. This is the main problem which has been limiting our supply rates for the past year.
On to the new model(s).
We would expect these to sell in higher quantities. We do not want our customers having to face considerable lead times. IOW, we want to be able to quickly adjust to varying demand. We have a few custom made motherboard prototypes. They perform very well, but there are off the shelf options available which are to close in performance to warrant using these motherboards. If we were to use these, and demand ramps up, we would be facing very significant lead times. In fact we found a slightly better performing one, just released, which is available off the shelf, so we will likely switch to using that.
We have assigned paid research to a high tech analysis company to find an explanation for some results we observed leading to better sound. This type of advanced research seems to be rarely performed in our branch. We have received some very interesting results already which we can use to increase performance in cheaper products, and ultimately over time, should lead to upgrades for our top of the line Extreme model.
We want our products to be future proof, upgradeable to whatever we can come up with at reasonable cost, at any point in time.
Therefor our current line of thinking is towards introducing a new model, at a lower price point, but upgradeable to the Extreme level at near the price differential. It would need to be housed in the same chassis for that, and we are getting production rates for that under control, slowly but surely. We are exploring several cost saving solutions, like a single, lower performance CPU, enabling usage of an Aluminium single CPU cooling system, together a significant cost saving. We could cut the Memory modules used by 50%. And it would also lower power requirements for the power supply saving cost there, and possibly use some cheaper, more readily available off the shelf components for it. We would want to retain the PCIe internal storage solution as if we were to switch to SATA SSD storage, our Qobuz/Tidal solution would outperform local file playback quality. If we wanted to release an even cheaper model, it would likely have to be a streamer only solution, as it makes no sense to have internal storage capability with inferior playback quality.
While at the topic. I'm open to community opinion feedback here!
