A nice PC upgrade

I believe improved sound has something to do with the wood vapors seeping into the hard drive and coating the internals. I hope it is a maple wood and not a sycamore platform. Eventually sycamore tweaks can cause hearing issues.

If you can get our head out of your butt, you are welcomed to come over and actually hear it yourself.

"08-16-14: Cerrot
It's a custom gateway, intel quad core, 16 gigs ram. PCI sound card and three internal 10,000 rpm drives. 10 meter apogee spdif cable ifrom pc (in next room) and into esoteric G25u clock/upsampler and into esoteric k03sacdplayer for dac. Jrivrr19 and I'm pinching myself."

Does having a powerful computer like the one you list really offer better sound quality? I never thought playing music on a PC was very resource intensive. What about AMD processors? Do you think it would really sound different than an Intel?

Getting back to your original topic, have you ever considered upgrading your case? If the brass feet and wood blocks really make a noticeable difference, I don't see why a better case wouldn't be an upgrade as well. Have a look at Corsair's Obsidian series cases. Not only is it very well built, but its actually designed to be quiet. I have one myself, and if anything ever happened to it, I would definitely buy it again. Its not too expensive (150-175), and Tiger Direct usually has them in their stores. Everything's standardized, so whatever you have in your Gateway will fit in a new case.

08-22-14: Zd542
Does having a powerful computer like the one you list really offer better sound quality? I never thought playing music on a PC was very resource intensive. What about AMD processors? Do you think it would really sound different than an Intel?

It depends. Playing music is not resource intensive, unless you do digital signal processing. But even for just playing music, it also depends. For example, for JPlay people have found quad-cores sound better than dual-cores, which in turn sound better than single-cores, but none of these was running hard to start with. So don't know why, but that is what is being reported.

For most applications, however, a low-processing power processor is enough. Example: Intel DM2800, like in CAPS v3 Lagoon.
I think the ability to use an audiophile USB card is more important than processing power in a mobo.

I believe you need as powerful a computer as possible (set up properly, isolated, keep away from USB) for computer audio. Kind of like big powerful amps. They do make small scale music sound btter, even though you dont think you need the power. In puter audio, you need all the help you can get. I'm sure I can get good results from an AMD chip (if it decides to behave) but I'm an Intel guy, and no need to save a few bucks to go over to AMD. I did look at the case but the way I would go is actually just putting everything on a wooden board (hey, violins are made from wood) and replace all the power supplies. Not sure if I will take that on as I am really enjoying the sound from my computer right now. I dont believe playing music is necessarilly resource intensive, but it is a dedicated resource and you need to make sure you have alternate resources available to do all the other things a computer does while you are playing music. Even turning off all "unnecesssary programs" leaves a bunch on that will take resources away from what you want to do, so, more heavy lifting requires a stronger computer.