Snow Leopard and audio quality

The S'Leopard and iTunes 9x are the best $25 tweak improvement I've made. Surprising to the :) side is a mild statement.

The Minis I have are the 2 ghz intel dual core & 1 gb sdram.

Really, it's night and day. Noticed it when I did a simple upgrade, but when I decided to do a clean install of S'Leopard that's when the differences really came alive.

:) listening,

Ed

I gave this a shot today -- hey, what better way to spend a Sunday afternoon, right? -- and found, much to my delight, that things are really improved after doing a clean install. It's like the whole system got dialed in, with everything coming into focus. There's a kind of midrange clarity I didn't know I'd been missing, until hearing it just now. What had been really good after upgrading to SL is significantly better after starting from scratch. I'll admit to having had my doubts, but I had to give it a try -- just in case. Now, I'm very, very glad that I did. Thanks so much for giving me this idea.
-- Howard

We are also finding very positive sonic improvements with the latest iTunes / Snow Leopard. With iTunes, this seems to have been a trend all along with even the "minor" iTunes updates (the ones that happen monthly/quarterly). Some don't improve the playback quality at all, but other minor updates do actually improve the playback quality. All for free! Thank god that Apple hasn't figured out they could actually charge audiophiles for these improved sounding updates ;-)

Can someone explain what is meant by a "clean install"? Can it be done on a general purpose iMac or is this only for dedicated Macs used in music systems?

Thanks

Clean install means reformat the hard disk and install Snow Leopard from scratch, as opposed to installing it over an older OS like Leopard or Tiger as an upgrade.

I had done a clean install of Snow Leopard on my Mini but I didn't notice any sound improvement.