My beta testing has been an up and down experience, mostly up, and after a lengthy session with Wilson, I'm optimistic this will continue to be the best digital I've heard in my system. These impressions are still early, only a week or so after installation, with some bumps along the way.
I am a Chord DAVE user and, so far, haven't seen many beta reports from DAVE users here (maybe folks are submitting feedback through TestFlight). I'm curious whether my experience is similar to other DAVE users. Before my Extreme shipped, Taiko installed HQP Desktop (version 4.7.2) and tweaked the HQP settings to mimic those of other Chord DAVE users to obtain the benefit of 16 million taps of upsampling power. I believe that Taiko also set it up so that HQP server would run on one CPU and NAA would run on the other CPU (I've asked Emile to confirm this).
Sound
The player that I am using most of the time these days is TAS/HQP. As many other beta testers have reported here, the sound is superlative with:
- stunning clarity and presence
- hidden detail and nuance emerging from blackest blacks
- vocals extremely lifelike
- immersive wall of sound with well-recorded music
Now, is this the sort of change I heard when first inserting the Extreme and replacing a somewhat outdated digital server/endpoint system? No. That change was seismic, the sort of change that you might hear a few times in a lifetime.
But -- the change wrought by this software is not small. With most music, it is immediately noticeable in the first 10-15 seconds, especially well-recorded music. The difference between really well-recorded music and poorly recorded music has grown, in my experience. Yes, some of the old Redbook tunes sound much better, but some of the bad stuff is still really bad.
On the whole, though, this is fantastic sounding software.
Compared to Roon/HQP
Even with HQP upsampling in conjunction with Roon, TAS is much, much better. And there is another huge benefit to TAS: when playing tracks in a playlist with different sampling rates, Roon/HQP would cut off the end of a song and start calculating the upsampling coefficient for the next song. You simply cannot listen to a playlist this way and so it meant playing songs one at a time. TAS/HQP solves that problem.
I will probably still use Roon for music discovery, using Chord ASIO as the audio playback device. The sound is much inferior to TAS but I'm not going to worry about that for new music discovery purposes.
Compared to HQP alone
This is the comparison I was really interested in because, prior to TAS, this was the highest fidelity digital I had experienced in my home. I can run HQP independently of both Roon and TAS by using VNC Viewer and just dumping music files into the HQP queue. I can also unplug the network and let the HQP queue just play out. Yes, HQP's user interface is primitive but the SQ is sublime.
HQP is much closer to TAS/HQP but my early impressions favor the latter. HQP as a standalone player sounds more raw, sometimes more dynamic, but with a little more edge. TAS/HQP still sounds very dynamic but is gentler on the ears, a little smoother and easier to listen to over time. I also find that TAS/HQP has the edge at capturing the authentic timbre of an oboe, clarinet, and other instruments where timbre is critical. Both players are extremely transparent.
Even if HQP standalone had a slight edge over TAS/HQP, I doubt I would use it much -- the user experience with TAS is light years beyond HQP standalone.
TAS/HQP compared to XD
When switching to XD, I've been using PCM 256 and DSD 8196, since these are the settings that Emile reported other Chord DAVE users were favoring. I haven't done a lot of experimentation with XD, but at least with PCM I think there is a clear winner and it is TAS/HQP. HQP is simply more dynamic, more transparent, more exciting with more PRAT, has greater ambiance, and is just a more pleasurable listening experience. If I were listening to XD without the benefit of hearing HQP, I'd think it was pretty great, but you can't unhear the glories of TAS/HQP.
Look and Feel
With my new iPad Air, TAS has an elegant aesthetic, with clean graphics and beautiful album art. The app is responsive to my touch, generally very speedy. Wilson and team are to be congratulated on providing a pleasurable visual and touch experience.
HQP Problems and Wilson to the Rescue
After about five days of smooth sailing, I ran into problems running TAS/HQP. The problems arose after I would switch to Roon or when I would switch to ExtremeDirect. Specifically, after switching back to TAS/HQP, I could not get it to play. The "playing" window would show the tune and would sometimes show the song progressing along, but there would be no sound. Other times, HQP would play a tune but the advance button would not work. I could sometimes get TAS/HQP to function but there was a randomness to how it was all occurring that confused me. So I reached out to the Taiko team with some TestFlight feedback and emails.
Wilson was quick to respond and we set up a TeamViewer session for the next day. Yesterday, Wilson spent an hour and forty-five minutes in my system (!). I am happy to report that everything has been working fine since then. He re-installed HQP, first using some older versions of HQP, which apparently did not work, and then back to version 4.7.2. That version now appears to work fine in my system. Thank you Wilson.
Not only did Wilson fix the problem, but he removed a part of HQP (something called "MEGA_DSP" or something like that) and now TAS/HQP is much faster to start playing tunes, with no apparent sonic penalty. Before this, HQP would take up to 36 or even 40 seconds to start a new tune, regardless of whether that tune was already in the queue or not. Although I was used to a long lag with Roon/HQP, it is annoying. Now it takes about 10 seconds or less. My understanding is that the heavy duty upsampling that HQP is doing with my settings is the reason for the lag, but I can tell you that 8 or 10 seconds versus 36 or 40 seconds is a huge difference and makes listening sessions much better.
Meanwhile, HQP is up to version 4.9.2, so at some point I am going to want Taiko to update this. But if you've been following the HQP thread over at audiophilestyle.com, you'll see that a number of people, including some Extreme users, believe that version 4.9.0 sounds better than the latest version. So I think I'll wait to update until the dust settles a bit.
Functionality
While we all hope that Taiko keeps finding ways to improve sonic quality, and that is the first priority for most of us, my feeling is that most of the longer-term work on TAS will focus on improving the user experience. I will have more to say about this in later posts as I get more time with TAS, but here are a few early observations:
- solving the gapless problem should be a priority; you simply cannot listen to side 2 of Abbey Road, or a good deal of other albums and pieces of music, with even a 3-4 second gap; it ruins the experience
- I ran into a problem with one of my album titles that mistakenly included a ")" symbol. I couldn't find it using search. When I finally tracked it down using File Explorer, I removed the symbol and re-scanned the library. Problem solved (as others have reported). I'm not sure how many other titles this might be affecting, however.
- as others have noted, it would be great to be able to search by DSD, PCM, sampling rate, label, and all the other categories of search that Roon now recognizes
- it would be nice to click on the name of an album in the Playing window and get that album to appear in Browse
- the existence of Album Review information (and Artist and Lyrics) has some surprising omissions in my experience (e.g., Exile on Main Street); Roon's incorporation of AllMusic content appears to be much more comprehensive (not sure why this would be the case -- maybe something to do with TAS recognizing the music being played?)
- incorrect album art selected for some recordings, e.g., a pair of Shostakovich symphonies performed by Petrenko and Royal Liverpool Phil (found in a folder in my library so labeled), pulled up album art for Haitink conducting these symphonies with two different orchestras; I then checked on Roon and the correct album art was displayed
- nothing like Roon Radio; but I don't view this as a big problem because: 1) I tend to discover new music through reading about music and from friends; and 2) I can just switch to Roon!
- the TAS search function does not anticipate what you are searching for by suggesting albums, tunes, or artists; I miss this
Those are just a few notes I made; there will be more to follow. I hope other Beta testers come up with more suggestions/notes like this.
audiophilestyle.com
Will look into roon appliance - several gb of cache is quite crazy and indeed if thats the case it can explain the slowness - i would actually start wondering how much that impacts on the r/w cycles in the ssds we have if it builds a cache everytime on startup. 
