Because standard computers use large amounts of electricity and generate large amounts of noise. Many processes running on your computer degrade sound quality of the signal that you send to your DAC. RFI and grounding issues only complicate matters.
Single purpose low power devices, especially those running smaller operating systems(.e.g. Linux) tackle some of the problems. If your music is stored on a network drive in another room and connected by ethernet you also get galvanic isolation resulting in lower noise floor.
IMHE, getting rid of Audirvana+ was a big improvement in stability and improved user experience.
The main reason to stick with a regular computer is if you want to run HQ Player and do upsampling to quad DSD or do DSP equalization.
There is another computer and audiophile related site where plenty of folks more expert than me cover these topics in gory detail daily. I'd suggest reading there too, although many of those folks don't have too much experience with audio gear once it gets converted back to analog. Cheers,
Spencer
Single purpose low power devices, especially those running smaller operating systems(.e.g. Linux) tackle some of the problems. If your music is stored on a network drive in another room and connected by ethernet you also get galvanic isolation resulting in lower noise floor.
IMHE, getting rid of Audirvana+ was a big improvement in stability and improved user experience.
The main reason to stick with a regular computer is if you want to run HQ Player and do upsampling to quad DSD or do DSP equalization.
There is another computer and audiophile related site where plenty of folks more expert than me cover these topics in gory detail daily. I'd suggest reading there too, although many of those folks don't have too much experience with audio gear once it gets converted back to analog. Cheers,
Spencer