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RE: Does sound improve with higher end PCs?

Can you tell us the type of computers/sound cards/DAC's in these 1.6Ghz / 900MHz machines? For example, back in the day, Pentium CPU's were noisy and it was almost impossible to get good sound out of those sound cards without RF pollution - that was the day of less than 1GHz machines. There are SO MANY VARIABLES in SQ that I maintain it's almost irrelevant what the CPU speed is unless it's too slow to decode the audio properly.

IMO the whole raison d'etre for computer playback is for convenience in maintaining one's collection. This requires a database system running in the background whether it be built in like iTunes or more generic one like SQL as in Squeezebox systems. You therefore need a reasonably fast machine doing these chores so the speed headroom is needed. Otherwise, might as well just spin disks!

Another IMHO - I tried the low power CPU's like Atom a couple years ago (this goes for the VIA C7's which are even slower). Don't bother. Too slow for my taste even though the SQ was fine, rescanning my > 3000 album collection became too slow and transferring files thru the Ethernet via Samba sucked. CPU power usage has improved a lot these days in standard processors especially since they go into standby power usage.

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Archimago's Musings: A 'more objective' audiophile blog.

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