A bit of an update, and as a spoiler alert, no jaws have literally hit the ground during the lifting of veils.
I have replaced my aging HP i5 PC for a new Dell. My home PC gets used for many things, including the odd occasion (work related, not gaming or anything else fun) where I need something reasonably high powered. Anyway, the old HP was getting a bit sluggish, and at the same time I had the chance to buy a new Dell at a significant discount.
The new machine in an Intel i9 9900k, has liquid cooled PSU and processor, lots of fast memory, and other goodies. The old HP was an "all in one" design", so little more than laptop spec components with a nice screen. The new machine arrived late October, and I spent a happy weekend getting the thing set up, transferring software, lots of fun finding software keys, backing up music libraries, getting things to talk to the correct directories etc. Anyway, everything sorted and working without issue. During early November there were a couple of occasions when I started to think that the hifi system was sounding a little better with the new PC delivering the files. Nothing major, it was a simple case of the system sounding just a touch nicer. That said, I have been reading lots of stuff on the "Novel" thread on AS, with people claiming all sorts of sound quality improvements using high powered processors, low latency memory, this kind of thing. So were the improvements little more than optimism and expectation bias? Well, maybe not, after all this is not a change of part of a PC, but a whole new machine.
So last weekend I set up a bit of an experiment. Both PC's are currently connected to my home network, and both PC's have HQPlayer 4 installed. (albeit the old machine's HQPlayer is now in demo mode, so it stops after 30 minutes). So I loaded a short playlist of identical music files into HQ Player on both machines to try an A/B test. This was not an ideal test, when streaming the PC needs to have the web based Eunhasu software running and "talking" the sMS-200. When swapping from one PC to the other, it was necessary to fully shut down one PC (or pull out the ethernet cable) to get Eunhasu on the other machine working. So not an ideal A/B test, with much faffing around when swapping from PC to PC. After much swapping from one machine to the other, I ultimately come to the conclusion that everything sounded pretty much the same, irrespective of which PC was delivering the files. Not the most exciting of conclusions I know, but perhaps interesting to note that in my subjective experience, making significant hardware changes upstream of the sMS-200 appears to make little difference.
Moving out of the subjective domain, with the old HP "all in one", I always found Roon to be a little clunky in operation, just a little slow and cumbersome. With the i9 9900k, Roon is super slick, so that's at least something!
I have replaced my aging HP i5 PC for a new Dell. My home PC gets used for many things, including the odd occasion (work related, not gaming or anything else fun) where I need something reasonably high powered. Anyway, the old HP was getting a bit sluggish, and at the same time I had the chance to buy a new Dell at a significant discount.
The new machine in an Intel i9 9900k, has liquid cooled PSU and processor, lots of fast memory, and other goodies. The old HP was an "all in one" design", so little more than laptop spec components with a nice screen. The new machine arrived late October, and I spent a happy weekend getting the thing set up, transferring software, lots of fun finding software keys, backing up music libraries, getting things to talk to the correct directories etc. Anyway, everything sorted and working without issue. During early November there were a couple of occasions when I started to think that the hifi system was sounding a little better with the new PC delivering the files. Nothing major, it was a simple case of the system sounding just a touch nicer. That said, I have been reading lots of stuff on the "Novel" thread on AS, with people claiming all sorts of sound quality improvements using high powered processors, low latency memory, this kind of thing. So were the improvements little more than optimism and expectation bias? Well, maybe not, after all this is not a change of part of a PC, but a whole new machine.
So last weekend I set up a bit of an experiment. Both PC's are currently connected to my home network, and both PC's have HQPlayer 4 installed. (albeit the old machine's HQPlayer is now in demo mode, so it stops after 30 minutes). So I loaded a short playlist of identical music files into HQ Player on both machines to try an A/B test. This was not an ideal test, when streaming the PC needs to have the web based Eunhasu software running and "talking" the sMS-200. When swapping from one PC to the other, it was necessary to fully shut down one PC (or pull out the ethernet cable) to get Eunhasu on the other machine working. So not an ideal A/B test, with much faffing around when swapping from PC to PC. After much swapping from one machine to the other, I ultimately come to the conclusion that everything sounded pretty much the same, irrespective of which PC was delivering the files. Not the most exciting of conclusions I know, but perhaps interesting to note that in my subjective experience, making significant hardware changes upstream of the sMS-200 appears to make little difference.
Moving out of the subjective domain, with the old HP "all in one", I always found Roon to be a little clunky in operation, just a little slow and cumbersome. With the i9 9900k, Roon is super slick, so that's at least something!
1000 Pro - KEF Blade - iFi Zen Stream - Mutec REF10 - MC3+USB - Pro-Ject Signature 12
