Persistent brief, irregular interruptions in music

Stewboss wrote: Audirvana really does sound better that Foobar.

IMHO not possible. Once it's bit-perfect, it's bit-perfect. If Foobar is set to put out a bitperfect stream, and there's a good DAC to catch it without jitter... it can't get any better.

On the topic of how a PC should last.... Well... It takes some luck, care and maintenance (including opening it once a year to blow away dust and grime: I am a heavy smoker, and a brownish dusty crud gets stick to fans and cables). Of course I am speaking of desktop computers, not laptops (which seem to be more prone to accelerated aging). My Windows XP home computer has been running for 8 and a half years, and still going. Sure, once I had to replace RAM because it was doing funny stuff (CRC errors), but all the rest is as when I assembled it originally. Still going strong, of course unfit for HD video editing and heavy tasks, but for Internet, music, photo editing, writing it's great.

On the other hand... I have seen Windows systems so full of software garbage and failing registry after only 6 months of use that a reformat was the only way to fix them.

But probably being a computer science engineer helps! :-)

Graham Slee wrote: I agree with Lucabeer regarding software garbage killing windows PCs. Although I tend not to run garbage programs I'm sure some of them indeed contain garbage.

Exactly. Even if you install only "serious" software, legit (=no viruses or bloatware), it's the intrinsic structure of the OS, based on the archaic "Windows registry", which is flawed due to legacy compatibility (at the same time a bliss and a curse). The registry is a messy "log" which gets constatly updated and bloated, full of inconsistencies for every program, file type, device, and whatever is on the computer. And it NEVER gets clean: it can only get worse in time. Try and type "regedit" at the command, and have a look at the registry: it would take weeks to read all is there, and most of it is beyond comprehension.

And to add insult to the injury, the basic structure of Windows 7 and 8 seems to be somehow flawed when real time execution is involved. The proof? Run the latency checker on a 8 years old Windows XP machine on a humble single core Pentium 4: if the system is well cared for, the average latency is extremely LOW. On a 7/8 system with eight cores and i7 (thus with enormously higher computational power), it's very likely that the average latency is at least four times the one of the old XP system.

That's not a way of saying that OSX is superior. Well, technically it IS. But at least half of my Windows programs don't have an equivalent on OSX. So the better performance comes at the price of a much more rigid structure which actually allows you to do less things. Admittedly, though, the less things it does are done better.


Edited by Lucabeer - 08 Jun 2014 at 1:54pm

What does that filter do?

Me, I prefer my software player to do no processing at all. No upsampling, no filtering. Pure bitstream fed with kernel streaming to the dac (in my case Oppo BDP 105D, which is also a nice CD, SACD, DVD and Bluray player).

Edited by Lucabeer - 08 Jun 2014 at 9:58pm

That's not a way of saying that OSX is superior. Well, technically it IS. But at least half of my Windows programs don't have an equivalent on OSX. So the better performance comes at the price of a much more rigid structure which actually allows you to do less things. Admittedly, though, the less things it does are done better.
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