Has anyone found any benefit to restarting the Taiko switch? For some reason my system was sounding a bit off over the last few days. (Perhaps a little bit leaner, smaller sound stage, vocals had a less sharp image). I tried restarting the Extreme, clearing cash on Roon, etc, but nothing worked. On a whim, I decided to restart the switch and that seems to have fixed everything. Is this normal? Is there any reason to have to power cycle the switch every now and again? I think mine was running for over 1 month straight.
This is an interesting phenomenon we have discussed before in this thread. It’s also something which is hard to quantify as it’s unmeasurable by conventional means, meaning perhaps we just don’t know what to measure, in high-end audio this is often referred to as a quantum effect, probably because nobody, or at the very least, very few, really fully understands quantum mechanics. You can count me as one who doesn’t understands the mechanics involved, but I’m also not sure this actually has anything to with that either. Bottom line, we don’t really understand what this is, but we know it happens, and we know how to deal with it / address it.
This is not something which has anything to do with the switch itself, other then it having a very large highly conductive mass with its ~15 kilograms of pure copper.
The Extreme itself having a significant conductive mass, including solid copper heatsinks, has a good affinity for this phenomenon as well.
There are large numbers and types of grounding tweaks working on this effect and we used to manufacture one of those in our early years, called the “Setchi”.
What it is, or rather how it’s best described, is some kind of charge buildup, over time it can start affecting sound quality. What it is exactly we don’t know. We do know it accumulates in large conductive masses. There are grounding tweaks creating a high affinity for this, if you use silver for example, it’s more conductive then copper, and this “charge” “likes” to move there. Then there are mechanics to dissipate this charge, batteries for example. Connecting a battery negative pole to a highly conductive mass appears to be able to dissipate this energy. There are a large number of manufacturers using all types of techniques to address this. Electrostatic, electromagnetic, piezoelectric, electronic circuitry and/or “quantum technology” seemingly addressing this.
Powercycling components with large conductive masses once in a while is good practice, but if you have one of those “mysterious” grounding systems this can upset equilibrium aswell.
The good news is that batteries seem to be able to have the highest affinity for this “charge”, can drain it from your system and convert it(?) to useable power or something, and we’re about to introduce those into our products!