Hardware tuning:
- Get the best power supply you can afford. PC- Computing 860, Corsair HX1000 makes clear sonic difference.
- E7200 or E7300 for lowest power consumption
- Underclock as much as possible. Using E7200, the difference between 2.53Ghz and 1.2Ghz is clearly audible.
- Use fastest possible RAM at 3-3-3-9. RAM clock at 3-3-3-9 and 5-5-5-15 is audible difference. Prefer to get Kingston HyperX top model 4G RAM.
- More RAM will help reduce pop/click.
- Use as many 玄人志向 as possible
- Use lowest clock and power consumption graphic card, e.g. ATI 4350/4550/4650 sound card only.
- Best motherboard you can afford. I feel Asus P5Q Deluxe sounds better than Gigabyte GA-G31M-S2L
- Overvoltage South Bridge and North Bridge for about 5%
Sound Card
- Interface PCI-E better than PCI better than Firewire better than USB
- Digital Output Interface: AES dual wire > AES > coaxial > Firewire > USB
- Use computer as digital output only and use external DAC for analogue.
- Use of Sound Card Analogue output interface is not recommended
- Uses external Word clock > Sound Card internal clock
Software configuration and playback
- Smallest sound card latency (32 samples)
- Deploy "Art of building computer transport" to clean up XP. Ie. take away all unnecessary services
- For playback software, Cplay > Foobar.
- Offline upsampler > online upsampler
- Native 24/192 material > Native 24/96 material upsample 24/192 > Native 24/96 > 16/44 Upsample 24/192
- Turn off Anti-Virus and firewall (at your own risk…) to prevent pops and clicks
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