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In the Forum: Didital Things
In the Thread: Why I hate computer playback.
Post Subject: My audio PC(s)Posted by manisandher on: 3/15/2017
 Amir wrote: |
| Please share more information about your PC. |
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Amir, I have two PCs for purely audio purposes - one for my main listening room and one for my home office. The former was built commercially by Phasure (http://www.phasure.com/index.php?topic=3621.0) and the latter self-built, but using an OS disk provided by Phasure. I'll briefly describe my own-built office audio PC here.
It's based on an ASRock motherboard with a Xeon E5-2683v3 CPU. This is a 14 core (28 thread) CPU. Why such a powerful processor for audio? All my (and others who've followed the same approach) experience suggests that the less the various threads are being taxed during playback, the better the sound. Seems crazy I know, but that's been our experience.
The other key to good sound seems to be to minimize as much electrical noise in the audio PC as possible. Using the OS disk from Phasure, it's possible to load the Windows 10 OS completely into RAM, and then remove the OS hard-drive. By connecting the audio PC to your LAN (music stored on a music server connected to the LAN), you can run the audio PC with no hard-drives (SSD or HDD) at all. I've also removed the video card and use RDC to connect to the audio PC. So, in total, the are literally no internal devices attached to the motherboard, and only 2 external connections made to it: 1) USB to DAC and 2) network cable to LAN.
I decided to go with totally passive cooling because I had an old Zalman TNN300 case lying around.
As I mentioned before, I've been using a microRendu in my office for quite a few months. This audio PC sounds substantially better than the microRendu. So much so that I sold the microRendu as soon as I heard the audio PC. But I can't stress enough that running the OS totally from RAM is key - with the OS hard-drive still in the audio PC, the sound is good, but it is totally transformed once taken out.
HTH.
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