I was reading about a music streamer from a latest Stereophile review and what was posted in the review had my BS meters pegged. I'm from the high tech industry with friends that work at Intel labs and friends that work for ARM computers and they haven't heard of some of these things that were posted. Maybe we can get clarification on these items so they don't sound so far fetched and the specifics posted in the review tainted the reviewers judgement IMO.
1) The review states this piece uses "a cpu that's highly prioritized for audio playback only ensuring highly optimized sound quality". I asked around if somebody is making a specific CPU for audio playback only. You know the Intel/AMD fabs that make cpu's make millions of them at a time, not 10-1000 custom cpus. Even when you look at the ARM cpus, none of them are built specifically for audio. There are millions of servers in the world that do database work for example that no cpu maker is building a specific cpu for database only applications. If there is a small company that are creating this kind of cpu, what kind of OS will run on it? This piece runs Roon so it has to be a somewhat generic cpu with a generic Linux OS running on it.
2) the review states: this unit "it plays live with no other processes running in parallel. as far as we know, unlike any other streamer on the market, this streamers cpu plays directly and live from the kernel without any processing or lag." Meter is pegged now. NO OS will run only 1 process at a time without hundreds of other system processes running in parallel or in the background. Using Unix/Linux, the OS is always in a flux state moving data around in its caches, in and out of memory, doing read a head, swapping, paging, etc... And these system processes are a good thing to keep the system stable and running efficiently.
3) this piece uses "new and faster enhanced memory". Meter is pegged again. During the last 2 decades using Linux servers and over 2 decades before that using Sun and IBM UNIX servers, I have never had the option of buying enhanced memory. I made a couple of calls and asked if they had any enhanced memory that they could sell me and they had no clue what I was talking about. Everybody can get fast memory but "enhanced"?
4) "the whole device plays 1 song directly from RAM". All linux OSs do this, you cannot go from any cache or ssd/hdd directly out of the computer, the data has to be read into ram 1st.If the system is paging, this data might be deleted from RAM and then have to reread into RAM before sending to a dac. I used many large PCIE cache cards to hold large amounts of data (used it as a database cache) but that cached data had to be moved from this fast cache to ram before sending out to the dac.
Most of the time, audio reviewers get psyched up when they hear new acronyms or a magical cpu or enhanced memory that taints their judgement. For example, this reviewer at the end stated "never before have I reviewed a stand-alone streamer/server so accomplished in the hardware department".
Maybe somebody could clarify some of this up for me/us in the audiophile community.
but Devinplombier has a great point. Audio is filled with this fancy language to help sell it's products.