A nice PC upgrade

It's a custom gateway, intel quad core, 16 gigs ram. PCI sound card and three internal 10,000 rpm drives. 10 meter apogee spdif cable ifrom pc (in next room) and into esoteric G25u clock/upsampler and into esoteric k03sacdplayer for dac. Jrivrr19 and I'm pinching myself.

My PC was previously under the desk in the office, on an oak wood board with 8 symposium fat pads under it. Replaced the oak board and symposium with the mapleshade system. There is definitely something to it. Computers are definitely the noisest place in the world.

If you can get our head out of your butt, you are welcomed to come over and actually hear it yourself.

I believe you need as powerful a computer as possible (set up properly, isolated, keep away from USB) for computer audio. Kind of like big powerful amps. They do make small scale music sound btter, even though you dont think you need the power. In puter audio, you need all the help you can get. I'm sure I can get good results from an AMD chip (if it decides to behave) but I'm an Intel guy, and no need to save a few bucks to go over to AMD. I did look at the case but the way I would go is actually just putting everything on a wooden board (hey, violins are made from wood) and replace all the power supplies. Not sure if I will take that on as I am really enjoying the sound from my computer right now. I dont believe playing music is necessarilly resource intensive, but it is a dedicated resource and you need to make sure you have alternate resources available to do all the other things a computer does while you are playing music. Even turning off all "unnecesssary programs" leaves a bunch on that will take resources away from what you want to do, so, more heavy lifting requires a stronger computer.

I would agree, Al. I think the chipset and the bandwith on
any applicable busses (I don't think Intel uses a frontside
bus any longer) (and USB bus, if one was unfortunate enough to
use it) and implementation of everything else are more
critical, assuming, of course, you do have a CPU fast enough
to handle the maximum tasks at hand effectively, without lag,
to begin with. These small atom boards, I don't believe do,
if they are running a standard windows OS, due to its bloat.
Problem is puters start running more and more processes (and
other things) in the background if not constantly maintained
which tax the CPU, which is why I recommend the biggest you
can afford - and constant cleaning! The larger, faster CPU's
come with the faster (better) chipsets. The motherboard is as
important as the cpu and its relationship (chipset) is
critical.

Thanks guys. I have seen the marantz and bryston. I think if I make a change, will custom build with linear power supplies or just buy a baetis. Thanks.