Computer for music only?

Lewinskih01

I in no way was making any attack on you. In all my reading and experience I simply had never heard of such a thing. Certainly many discuss minimizing CPU load and noises but unless you are listening and ripping at the same time I cannot imagine any issue causing audible degradation.

There's absolutely no reason a modern computer has to be dedicated to music playback. Some playback software can be more sensitive than others to other processes running, but audio playback is not CPU or disk activity intensive. Should you run Photoshop, burn a DVD and download an HD movie while listening to Pure Music with upsampling? Probably not, but going to the opposite extreme of having no other operations active is overkill.

Mwheelerk,

I didn't take your question as an attack. A fair challenge, which is a very healthy thing to have in a place like this. Hopefully my post from 4/6 addressed to you didn't come through as defensive. Was not my intention, anyway.

Onhwy61,

I think you are partly right. A process that doesn't run while playing music should generate electrical noise/jitter.

However, there are many reports from users talking about sound improvements from minimizing the processes that run on a computer. I know I experienced a very significant improvement in sound from running the same OS on the same hardware without and with AudioPhil's Optimizer, which does exactly that. So I'm a believer. One of the critical processes to disable seems to be graphics and running headless, rendering a computer useless for anything other than audio playback. So in my view a computer dedicated to audio is the best way.

This doesn't mean audio will sound bad on a multi-purpose computer. For a long time I used a laptop to feed my Audiophilleo and DAC with great results. I'm only saying to get the BEST results a dedicated computer is the way to go. Just like anything in audio, I guess, a full blown assault renders better results than "just" a very good one.

Many other folks who use JPlay report best sound from using two computers optimized for audio: one as controlPC and one as audioPC. I can't comment on this as I haven't tried it, but again it shows there are improvements to be gained from dedicating a computer to audio only.

Some folks are experimenting with EMI/RFI shielding and absorption inside a computer and report improvements. Overkill? Maybe, but I haven't tried it so can't speak.

The issue of noise in a PC is an interesting and complicated one. I think it goes without saying that the PC should not have a lot of other work being down on it. Surfing the Internet while playing music is just a bad idea. I also turn off any virus control when playing music. You should minimize what is running, but going to hibernate mode on JPlay seems extreme. Without running any special software on my laptop there is seldom more than 1% CPU usage other than the music player. I know there are all sorts of positions on this, so will not dwell on it.

One option is to deal with the issues outside of the PC. Products like ifi's iUSBPower or iPurifier or Empirical's various products like his reclocker can deal with many of the ill effects of the PC environment. One option is to do the obvious things to minimize PC usage and then use these outboard solutions. Food for thought.