Home Computer Audio Asylum

Music servers and other computer based digital audio technologies.

RE: Enough Computer Audio Mythology

There are good reasons why changing the control program might affect the sound quality. It might not be necessary for the control program to be running to affect the sound on playback. It might not be necessary for the control program to even be loaded in memory to have an effect. For example, two different control programs could result in the play program or the audio samples being loaded in different places in memory. Also, they could have left the CPU caches in different states.

If you want to have a fair shot at a valid experiment you would need to verify that both control programs left RAM memory in the exact same state, which means that the audio data has not only to be the same, it has to be stored in the same locations and every other memory location in the RAM has to be identical. In other words, the entire RAM has to be scrubbed except for the audio. At the least this will require verification that the audio data is loaded in the same locations and is unchanged. Scrubbing the rest of the RAM can probably be accomplished by rebooting the computer, if the audio data in RAM can be somehow protected. (I say "probably" because there still could be logic state that does not get reset at the time of a software reboot.)

Beware of the Turing tar-pit in which everything is possible but nothing of interest is easy.




Tony Lauck

"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar



This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors:
  Sonic Craft  


Follow Ups Full Thread
Follow Ups

FAQ

Post a Message!

Forgot Password?
Moniker (Username):
Password (Optional):
  Remember my Moniker & Password  (What's this?)    Eat Me
E-Mail (Optional):
Subject:
Message:   (Posts are subject to Content Rules)
Optional Link URL:
Optional Link Title:
Optional Image URL:
Upload Image:
E-mail Replies:  Automagically notify you when someone responds.