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In Reply to: RE: Well, it depends - the simple answer is "yes, a lite OS by itself should not affect sound quality" posted by Audio Bling on January 29, 2009 at 22:51:45:
Well, I did distributed operating system research in the 80s - my specific interest was "micro-kernels".
Interestingly, most of the major operating systems used today on PC hardware (Windows, MacOS, Linux) are all based on micro-kernels.
Of the three, Linux is in fact the "least" micro-kernel of them. Linus basically took the Minix code base (which Andrew Tanenbaum wrote using a micro-kernel philosophy) and made it more monolithic.
Now, the good thing about micro-kernels is that the heart of the OS is very tiny - basically a pre-emptive scheduler, a shared memory mechanism, the ability to create threads or processes with very little overhead, and a simple but robust IPC mechanism.
Given that, there is no real advantage in running say a lite distribution of Linux (which comparatively has a bigger core kernel) compared to let's say a fully bloated installation of Windows. Standard XP will run happily in 512MB of memory with no paging (I explicitly disable virtual memory).
On both, you can control exactly which services, drivers etc. get loaded.
So, given that, to me the important factor for an audio PC is the quality of the drivers, and specifically what gets executed in kernel mode vs user mode.
In my case, I had no choice. At the time I built my network player, only Windows drivers were available for the hardware, so I opted for Windows. Also, I wanted to make the player "headless" (no video display, no keyboard, no mouse) with the only user interface a 20x4 VFD and a remote control. Again, only Windows drivers were available for the VFD and remote controller I chose.
PS - spread spectrum doesn't actually reduce EMI or LIM, it just spreads it around. In some cases, this results in worse sound, in others it can improve the sound. In my case, especially after I constructed a primitive EMI shielding around the audio circuits, I found that turning spread spectrum no longer has any impact on sound quality (which is a good sign - because it implies that the EMI shield is probably working).
Anyway, my personal experience is that once I got rid of all moving parts and motors, used low power components, did the shielding, used an external DC power supply, then the sound quality seemed to be completely immune to what the PC was doing, what programs were running on it, etc. I recently switched from winamp to foobar, and didn't notice any differences in sound quality (even though foobar uses a lot less CPU than winamp). I have also tried switching between ASIO and DirectKS - no difference.
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Follow Ups
- RE: Well, it depends - the simple answer is "yes, a lite OS by itself should not affect sound quality" - Christine Tham 01:15:57 01/30/09 (0)
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