Taiko Audio SGM Extreme music server

The Taiko Audio SGM Extreme holds concepts very similar to Sir Dave Brailsford’s ideas of ‘Marginal Gains’ and the ‘1% Principle’. Using these concepts of making small, but repeatable changes to everything in the process allowed Sir Dave Brailsford to take British cycling to go from winning a single Olympic gold medal in its 76-year history prior to 2002 to winning seven out of ten Olympic track cycling gold medals in the 2008 Beijing Olympics, and it took until the 2020 Tokyo Olympics for other teams to catch up. Looking to the improvements possible with a music server, Emile employed a similar ethos; that anything that can be improved, should be improved… even if that improvement produces marginal gains, those gains accumulate, and the net result pushes far ahead of the opposition.

Listening centred around the SGM Extreme sending the signal via USB to the T+A SDV 3100 HV tested in the last issue. From the get-go, just in background listening, it was clear we were in the company of greatness. While streamed audio is extremely good, there’s always a nagging sense of something a little more that can be extracted from a spinning disc. There’s a ‘tangible’ quality to the physical format that doesn’t quite translate to streamed and served music. The score is evened slightly when dealing with well-curated music (online or locally networked), and streamed audio has reached a point where it eclipses all bar the best physical players. But when dealing with the highest quality options, to date, the spinning disc has the edge.

The SGM Extreme changes the game. It is the point of inflexion for that high-end sound. It’s the point where high-end streaming takes on the same degree of subtlety and rootedness that you might get from an absolute pinnacle CD or SACD player. For those of us who are used to streaming and what it can do, listening to the SGM Extreme is like 20 years of validation, and for those who aren’t, it just sounds damn good.

It’s a bit of an abstract property but the SGM Extreme just sounds ‘right’ whatever you play. The order and structure of the music are as you expect they should be, rather than ‘almost’ how they should be. This is something more than accurate tonality, wide dynamic range, precision, vocal articulation, detail, rhythm or any of those regular characteristics. In part because you can get pretty much all of those things to a very high degree from the most basic level streaming. It’s just that the SGM Extreme simply raises the bar on every aspect of music by several notches.

This results in a surprisingly ‘un-digital’ digital sound, whatever you chose to play. Those tiny, almost inaudible cues that help you define ‘live’ music from its recorded counterpart are almost impossibly difficult to replicate in the home, but the sounds coming through the SGM Extreme take you a notch closer to that reality. Moreover, the pervasive ‘thinness’ of sound (not in terms of tonality or solidity of presentation, more a sense of the sound being a little insubstantial) and the ‘greyness’ of digital audio is, well, gone. This is perhaps something more ‘perceived’ over a few hours than any kind of instant gratification, but you find yourself drawing deeper from the music played through the SGM Extreme.

I keep wanting to say ‘irrespective of genre or format’ in every sentence and it’s why I’ve been consciously avoiding pulling out specific recordings to highlight musical passages. This is like pressing the ‘reset’ button on your understanding of what digital audio is capable of. All those usual musical asides about aspects of sonic performance… yeah, it does all that and makes your DAC sound better in the process. But more importantly, it makes your music sound more like the real thing. And it does it universally!