In Reply to: RE: Tutorial help posted by Les Anderson on February 11, 2010 at 19:22:44:
The advantage to memory play is reduction of activity in the computer box during playback. Normally, data is read off of the disk into memory and then copied to the device, so there are two separate activities going on. With memory playback only copying data from memory to the device is happening. Ideally, the hard drive could be spun down as well, so there wouldn't even been any electrical and acoustic noise while listening to music.
The assumption is that less activity means a cleaner signal out of the computer box to the DAC. Whether this is true or not, and whether or not this affects the output of the DAC will depend on the specific system.
The primary disadvantage to memory playback is the time spent up front loading memory. There is also an extra cost of large amounts of memory, which will be measured in gigabytes when playing long hi-res playlists. For example, I have one double album that would require 5 GB just to hold the WAV file for the complete program.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
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Follow Ups
- RE: Tutorial help - Tony Lauck 09:21:52 02/12/10 (1)
- Thanks nt - Les Anderson 11:19:39 02/12/10 (0)