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Music servers and other computer based digital audio technologies.

RE: Squeezeplay -- SqueezeOS

This is one of the big debates going on now. My experience has been that lower powered devices sound better, but there are quite a few others that insist that the fastest processors with gazillions of gigabytes of ram sound best.

I did a test several years ago where I took a stripped down puppy linux with realtime kernal and just ethernet and USB running (no X windows, no display) and netjack2 and ran this from a USB stick with a USB DAC on a whole bunch of diferent computers. (the USB stick is only accessed at boot time, the OS and all programs are copied into ram). The music data came over the ethernet from another computer also running netjack2 and a simple wav player. Netjack2 is a very simple protocol which just uses UDP so it takes very little processing on the "player" computer.

There were major differences in sound quality with this test. The best was a FitPCslim (Geode LX800) closely followed by an old VIA EPIA mini-itx board running at 600MHz. The FitPC2 was not as good as either of these. The worst were the three laptops I tried it on (a Lenovo, Fujitsu and Dell). The desktops faired inbetween with the server that I usually use for running the squeeze box server being the best and the old pentium 4 box being the worst.

This was about as tightly controled as I could get, exactly the same software running on all the machines, no local storage used for programs or data.

There was no correlation with the amount of memory that I could find, they all had plenty of memory to run this VERY stripped down system, as far as CPU performance went, there was correlation on the lower side (the two very underpowered wimpy systems sounded the best) but not on the upper end. Most of the desktop systems had more powerful processors than the laptops yet the laptops sounded worse.

John S.



Edits: 06/13/12

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