Taiko Audio SGM Extreme : the Crème de la Crème

Taiko Audio

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What an excellent report, Emile. Thank you. Much appreciated. I had to finally register here, so I can post.

Welcome to the forum nenon!

but one may be too attached to the glare-y sound and may even prefer it. It is indeed a way to tweak your system.

We could add some systems may have been voiced around a "glare-y" sounding component by for example compensating with "dark" interconnects, subsequently replacing that component with a less "glare-y" one could be perceived as it unjustly being dull sounding and perhaps lacking "detail".

One of my takeaways from Emile’s report is how dependent the network tweaking is on the local environment. It’s very important to keep in mind the context of his tests. And people should be careful how they read his report.

Absolutely, thank you for highlighting that.

He did not say that the etherREGEN is better than the SOTM. He said that the etherREGEN “was initially disappointing” but in a very specific scenario it sounded really good (and better than the SOTM combination he has tried).

Yes, and I'm not using the Ether Regen as it is supposed to be used, but how I got the best results from it in MY system. So if you do not like how it performs using it as the manual suggests, do experiment a bit before discarding it.

Also note I belief there to be a reason for why I did not get satisfying results from the SOTM being the silver wire "upgrade", as its sound signature seems similar to more "aggressively" voiced solidcore silver interconnects. It's of course very interesting this same signature is evident in analogue interconnects and network switches. But at this stage it is an assumption until I have replaced it with copper wire.

He also said that he has “done a brief check with a low power server prototype with no SFP port present running an audiophile Linux variant, and the results are very different”. You have to keep those things in mind. I hope the person who commented earlier that he changed his purchasing decision based on that report has an Extreme server or is planning to buy one. There are other reports that can be found comparing switches with different results in a different context.

Once again thank you for highlighting that.

I have been playing a lot with my home network recently. As some others have reported, replacing the all-in-one cable modem/router/firewall/etc. box the cable companies in the US provide with a dedicated cable modem.

Unfortunately that is a bridge too far for most. We don't have that option here in our building either.

good linear power supplies helps a lot.

Wholeheartedly agree.

I know Uptone was engineering the etherREGEN switch to be insusceptible to upstream devices and were thinking that the power supply would probably not matter.

I would suspect they are aware but just cannot include a high grade LPS at that price level.

Having said all that, I am curious what the entire upstream network looks like at Emile’s lab.

We don't have options to choose between, we have a 200Mbit line with the modem provided by the ISP in the basement. From there I have a 5 meter copper cable into our demo room where I split it into an audio and office network. The office network has hundreds of meters of wiring and dozens of devices so I do experiment isolating my audio network from that, but also quite often just use a Netgear GS-108 as a "splitter" to simulate more real world scenarios.

I am also curious if Emile has done any testings with the JCAT Net Femto card in the Extreme.

Yes I did, in the final version of the Extreme this was a sideways move, though in early versions a definite upgrade. Do note the JCAT Femto card provides the option to power it from an external power supply which again would give you a degree of voicing. However external powersupplies used this way are able to damage the Extreme beyond our control.
 
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seeteeyou

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MAC address of that particular SFP might also provide some clues?
 

Taiko Audio

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Absolutely. Emile has said countlessly that a good USB cable, a good power cord and footers trumps everything else

Still support that statement. However I did buy the Telegartner Gold M12 just now as I do like what it does, though arguably expensive, relative to total system expense it may just be "value for money" ;)
 

oldmustang

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oldmustang

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wil

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I played with different routers and WiFi access points. And yes, they sound differently. Using a router without build-in WiFi between the cable modem and the etherREGEN removed a lot of that digital glare. From that experience I feel like the noise generated by the WiFi routers have big contribution to the digital glare. I am using Ubiquiti EdgeRouter X (and the SFP version) routers currently. I like those devices a lot. They have 12V DC input (unlike some of the bigger Ubiquiti devices), so they are easy to power up with LPS. They have a lot of functionality in a really small box with a really simple and nice PCB layout. And they are cheap and easy to configure (if you know what you are doing). For example, it took seconds to create a dedicated VLAN for my server on one of the ports, so my local network broadcast messages would never reach my server. It enables DHCP and routing automatically for you.

My network looks like this at the moment: Cable modem —> Ubiquiti EdgeRouter X SFP —> etherREGEN —> JCAT NIC on my server, all powered by good LPS, cables, etc. Let's ignore the ethernet cables to keep this post more simplified, but I have been playing with a lot of those too. That network set up sounds really good, but I need to add WiFi back. Luckily that router has a SFP port, so I am now playing with various ways of connecting a WiFi access point that is isolated by fiber. I have a second Ubiquiti router, a bunch of media convertors, so there are plenty of options, and I need to find which one works best for my network. A lot of tests ahead of me, but you get the idea of what I am trying to do.

Nenon, In your description above, are you still using the modem provided by your ISP? I have Att (fiber optic) and I think their "Gateway" modem box must still be used.
 

Ackcheng

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Hi Guys,
I am currently a EVO user. Hope you don’t mind me to contribute a bit here. Have you guys considered network tuning like VLAN and priority setting with commercial switch?
 

ketcham

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This can also be done with more mainstream switches like my Cisco switch below. I have since switched to an audiophile router. That said in my personal network I port priority two: my NAS and Waversa Wrouter. This eliminated 1-2 second pauses that were happening. (There are many great audio oriented switches out there now and my prediction, new and improved ones in the near future).

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/suppo...protocol-stp-on-a-interface-on-the-200-3.html
 
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Ackcheng

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Thanks Ketcham. I am using Cisco SG300. But my setup is a little bit different. I use SGMS with Revanna and merging DAC. All my digital connection is via Ravenna. So cannot use audiophile switch without QOS.
 
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jturbo

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This can also be done with more mainstream switches like my Cisco switch below. I have since switched to an audiophile router. That said in my personal network I port priority two: my NAS and Waversa Wrouter. This eliminated 1-2 second pauses that were happening. (There are many great audio oriented switches out there now and my prediction, new and improved ones in the near future).

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/suppo...protocol-stp-on-a-interface-on-the-200-3.html

STP - Spanning tree protocol is not involved in packet forwarding, it merely plays a role in avoiding loops in an etherent network. The priority field in this case is not related the priority forwarding of packets going to or from the port, but rather the priority the port has in shutting down to not be part of a loop. In the case of STP, a port with a priority of zero would be a higher priority and would stay up if a neighbor switch port advertised a priority greater than zero.

Quality of service and port queueing are related to the priority forwarding of packets in a data stream. This is where you would want to prioritize traffic. Unless you are running 4K or higher video streams at the same time that you are streaming music, it is unlikely that QOS would make much difference in terms of your music stream as QOS in a network device is only invoked if there is an outbut packet queue forming, and that is hard to do when most switch ports drain @ 1gigabit per second.[/QUOTE]
 
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CKKeung

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Thanks Ketcham. I am using Cisco SG300. But my setup is a little bit different. I use SGMS with Revanna and merging DAC. All my digital connection is via Ravenna. So cannot use audiophile switch without QOS.
Hello Ackcheng,
You must be the Ackcheng in HK?

If the capability of a commercial managed switch is mandatory for your audio setup, you may consider to send it to one of the diy shops for tweaking, such as giving it a LPS or installing better internal ocxo modules.

A good frd of mine did so.
Actually his Netgear router and Buffalo switch are syn together by the same added ocxo clock circuit.
 
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Ackcheng

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Yes CKK. I am from HK. Actually Ravenna use PTPv2 protocol and I slaved it to an external OCXO clock. This protocol seems more robust than word clock technically and it is very very quiet compared to the system I used to have. But I cannot compare directly. You are welcome to come with Ben and have a listen!
 

Taiko Audio

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Hi Guys,
I am currently a EVO user. Hope you don’t mind me to contribute a bit here. Have you guys considered network tuning like VLAN and priority setting with commercial switch?

Hello Ackcheng,

I have played around with that, especially since I have to share my bandwidth between my audio system and our office systems. Seperating traffic by VLANs and/or creating different subnets is very audible, it will simply lower the network activity on your segment. The downside is you need a managed switch for that which often come with a sound quality “penalty”. I did not get much, if anything at all from prioritising traffic, but we never have high network utilisation, it could potentially be useful if you have someone in your home downloading movies for example.
 
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nuway

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Hi vhs,

Thanks for sharing, do take the effort to try different SFP modules when testing fiber optics, the ER performs very poorly with the Startech SFP1000ZXST SFPs which are my preferred modules in any other scenario! Are those Double Crowns btw?
Hi Emile,
Excellent report. Thank You for taking the time.
Have you tried those low power unbranded SFPs modules on the SOTMs switches and on the option 3) with the Startech FMCs? If yes, Can you please share results?
 
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Taiko Audio

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Hi Emile,
Excellent report. Thank You for taking the time.
Have you tried those low power unbranded SFPs modules on the SOTMs switches and on the option 3) with the Startech FMCs? If yes, Can you please share results?

No not yet. Will do so but it may take a while.
 
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nenon

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I also agree that VLAN separation helps with sound quality. But there are some gotchas. Read below. QoS not so much in my network. In theory QoS could even harm the sound quality. But I did not bother doing further tests QoS. Let me explain why.

Like anything else in the digital world, things are a little more complex than they look on the surface. And as I stated in my previous post they are system / environment specific too.

This Ubiquiti EdgeRouter X SFP router I recently started using for example is a really nice little device. It has just the right functionality I need. And when you power it up with a good LPS, it sounds great too. Changing the capacitors in the power section also brings up more goods, but that is more complicated than it sounds, because pretty much any better capacitors you install would be larger in size than the stock, and they won’t fit in the original case. That means you have to move the router to a new case too.

Let's look more into some of the capabilities this router has:
  • It can do NAT in hardware. It boosts up the performance of the router and you get a throughput increase from 300 Mbps to 950 Mbps.
  • It can do separate VLANs, and perform NAT / routing between them. That’s not something you see often on the consumer grade network devices.
  • It can do QoS.

Now, how do those features relate to sound quality?
  • NAT in hardware - pretty much all of our home networks have to perform NAT. NAT is translating the private IP addresses on our network (i.e. 192.168.x.x, 10.x.x.x, etc.) to public / routable IP addresses on the Internet. Doing this in hardware means that it is not done by the CPU on the router. Instead, it is done by a hardware chip. A hardware chip can do this much faster and much more efficiently. This type of CPU offloading helps the sound quality in two ways - first, it lowers the latency a little bit; and second, the CPU has to do less. The latter means the CPU is drawing less power, which if I was to speculate here probably means less noise. It also leaves more CPU capacity for the other processes.
  • The VLAN separation is easy to explain and other people have done it here before me. If you have your server/streamer on a dedicated VLAN, it would not receive any of the broadcast traffic from the rest of the devices on your network. That means the CPU and the OS have to do less. That essentially turns into better sound quality.
  • What happens if we enable QoS on this particular router? Well, Qos is not supported in hardware offloading, so the router would have to do heavier CPU utilization. And if my speculation above is right, that leads to more noise. I am not planning to go into the details of how QoS works, but I would say that there is no advantage of doing QoS in my network, so I can only cause more harm by enabling QoS.

But that is in my network with this particular router. The point I am trying to make here is that these are not universal settings that work universally on any device and in any network. An old consumer router, for example, with an older CPU, may generate more noise to do the VLAN switching - and that can easily outweigh the benefit of VLAN segregation.

I would not worry about the fact that audiophile switches don’t have layer 3 / VLAN capabilities. That’s probably even better. Leave the routing functionality to the router. I would rather keep the audiophile switches simple, so they can do what they are designed to do better. If you connect an audiophile switch to a port on a router that has a dedicated VLAN configured and DHCP enabled, you don't need the switch to be able to perform any special functions.

The most common question I got asked (privately) after my first post was:
Q. The Ubiquiti EdgeRouter X SFP has a 24V power supply. How do you power it up with 12V?
A. The Ubiquiti EdgeRouter X SFP comes with a 24V / 2.5A (SMPS) power supply. However it supports 9-26V DC on the input. So, yes, you can power it up with a 12V DC LPS like I mentioned in my previous post. And, no, it does not consume 60W. It is designed to provide PoE to multiple devices, that’s why the specs call for 60W. The way I use it, consumes less power than my etherREGEN switch. Give it 12V / 1A or more, and you would be fine.


Nenon, In your description above, are you still using the modem provided by your ISP? I have Att (fiber optic) and I think their "Gateway" modem box must still be used.
I am not sure about Att. I use Comcast / Xfinity. They give you a crappy cable modem / router / Wifi all-in-one device. It's much easier for them to manage their users if they were all using the same cable modem, firmware version, etc. But they also have a list of supported devices you can bring on your own.

Yes I did, in the final version of the Extreme this was a sideways move, though in early versions a definite upgrade. Do note the JCAT Femto card provides the option to power it from an external power supply which again would give you a degree of voicing. However external powersupplies used this way are able to damage the Extreme beyond our control.
So, on the Extreme, you use the onboard NIC with the Telegartner GOLD M12 switch, and that sounds better than utilizing a good external PCIe card like the JCAT? I was under the impression that the Extreme was highly tweaked to utilize fiber via the Startech PCIe card. And I thought switching to the onboard NIC with the Telegartner GOLD M12 switch may mean going back to the test lab to re-evaluate copper connectivity. But maybe I am wrong about this.
BTW, I am with you on the power supply thing. Tweaking your whole system with multiple rails of the same design power supply gives better results than using a mixture of many different power supplies.

If the capability of a commercial managed switch is mandatory for your audio setup, you may consider to send it to one of the diy shops for tweaking, such as giving it a LPS or installing better internal ocxo modules.
BTW, that is next on my list to try on the Ubiquiti and cable modem. But it would take some time, because I want to learn how to do it myself, and there is a learning curve associated with that. I would be happy to report my findings when I do.
 
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