Hi
I haven't read all the posts in his thread. My views are in line with those of DallasJustice.
Loooong Post.
One of the Tenets perhaps more than that: A statement of faith in the Audiophile mentality is that "Everything makes a difference". From this tenet it follows that the color of a cable should make a difference hence the often cited "metallurgy" word when they talk about cables.. THese tenets and ideas were transported whole into Computer Audio and are re-hashed to the 120th power by the Computer Audiophile website/forum: Ethernet cables start having a sound of their own and of course motherboard, heat-sink thermal glue... Things that do make a difference in term of pure computing, say RAM or Hard Drive starts to blur into audiophile jargon. DDR3 have better "pace" than DDR2. Router and switches have to be audiophile-level, it is thus better to use Teflon Wire and Audiophile Power Cords are thus connected to these "improved" switches with reduced-noise and EMI shielding, Power Supplies must be linear, true Audiophile use Win Serve 2018 because it has better sound than the lowly Home Edition ... .flac files don't sound as good as .wav ... SSD have better PRAT than HDD (I invented that one ... then again it may be true
).
I am talking from experience: I went on this site to build my music server using their recommended components ... it costs me back in 2013 a bundle .. I settle to one Gar L. Koh had put together based on a Toshiba laptop.. it did cost me much less and performed until its death/crash ... that is when I started using any PC powerful enough to run windows and these days have an i7 for ROON core, a Lenovo laptop... running Win 10 not optimized.. It helped that I had realized that I couldn't reliably tell 320 K mp3 from .wav file
.
We're getting slowly to the core of the issue. For many of us, reading this for us involve a PC perhaps a tablet but likely a PC, desktop or laptop. These items are indeed general purpose machines with enough processing power to perform most calculations any normal ( or insane) persons would come with. At the heart of this what these machines perform are calculations. And today any processor you're likely to find in a commercial machine costing new around $150 or less, has more processing power than the Cray-1 of yesteryear (Am I exaggerating? perhaps not). That is our PC and playing music is a simple chore for most them. It is nothing. Verifiable .. Listening to Spotify and having a dozen app opened .. Usage is around 6% on my i7 Lenovo 16 GB RAM work laptop , non-optimized for audiophiles duties
.. I am also downloading 2 large files and am connected to the Office VPN and perhaps with 20 tabs on Chrome tabs and Outlook receiving ...etc. So playing music is a nothing, a yawner for any PC .. There are some "but"s... I have experienced no issues 99.99999999999999% of the time. A click or "thing" in the sound has occurred once in a while.. not enough to warrant my while trying to reproduce it so evanescent it was and that may have happened less than 10 times since I have been using a PC to listen to music ... Still my PC is not appliance enough for music. Deep inside the modern man there is the need to press a button and see things done.. They (Marketing and Science
) have promised us that, we are not there yet... The interfaces between man and PC are simply not there yet .. They are almost afterthought for most programmers. The program works well ... except that we have to go through 68 levels of menus to find common tasks. Have a look at the "Infotainment"interface in most cars ... there must be a mandate to make them simpler because those have for sure already lead to accidents. Roon is not simple, nor are JRiver or even foobar... or ... It takes a long time to learn how to use these and setting them up requires even more research and learning and even then .. what you just learned so painfully, may not survive the next necessary upgrade.. Of course once you know how to delve into the 689 levels of menus to get to what you wanted to do you can make of it a "Hot Key" , you know an ALT + SHIFT + CAPS + F3, until your mind can no longer process the 200 Hot keys you have to remember to do anything.. Voice assistants do not help with music ... Meanwhile management of metadata is not a simple issue.. I am a fan of ROON and Western Classical Music ... ROON DON'T DO THAT well or perhaps I didn't know that yesterday night, at 11 PM Oslo Time they finally found a way ( Fat Chance !!) which is in Beta thus unstable so if one is a Classical Music fan one has to involve a different Library management system or software or method... Now if you want to use the immense power of PC to correct your room ... You can do it .. "easily" with ROON and an ARC software such as Acourate etc ... .. When it finally works you'll be BFF (Best Friend Forever) with several people on fora or perhaps the designers themselves...
I frankly do not advocate point and shoot simplicity but come on!! We have to realize we are in prehistoric times when it comes to interface. Of all the companies in the so-called Technology sector .. Apple may be one of the few to realize that... And their domination rests mostly on their interface which however kludge-y it can be at times is head and shoulder above the rest. They sell fewer things than any of the Giants yet are always hovering around #1 in term of Market Cap .. MSOFT the current leader sells a billion of things .. Google a Trillion . Amazon a Trillion of Trillion ... Apple mostly interfaces
... versions of those similar but not quite the same you will find on their iPhone, iPad, iWatch ... IOS.
To come back to the OP. Computer Audiophile is a money-making thing pandering to audiophiles, wants, needs and insecurities. I will not call those people "audiophool" they aren't fools. Having the means is not as simple as some would like to make it appear.. They have weaknesses in some area just like many of us. They use their wherewithal, to be pleased, to enjoy life ... In their own wrong way. And keep this in mind: They don't suffer financially from those mistakes.. They live another day to buy a new Ethernet Cable or a more expensive audiophile Ethernet Switch .. or "save" for the latest tube-based music server ( The millions of transistors that makes a microprocessor have been replaced by micro vacuum tubes ...
) ...
Or better for them in term of music enjoyment, they discover and follow ASR or one of its rare (which one? Please?) equivalent ..
Peace!