- Introduction |
- Hardware |
- Software |
- Sound Quality |
- Reference |
- Enjoy
An introduction to computer audio
- Amplifier
- ASIO driver
- Audio cables
- Bit perfect jitter
- Bits: 16 or 24
- Clock
- Crossover
- CDtext
- CDP vs DAP
- Cue sheet
- DAC
- Digital cable
- Direct Sound
- DLNA
- Driver
- DSP
- FireWire
- Headphone listening
- Hearing
- I2S
- ID3
- Kernel Streaming
- Memory player
- Music Server
- Perception
- Performance
- RAID
- Ripping
- RFI
- Router
- Sampling, up and over
- Sample Rate Conversion
- S/PDIF
- Tagging
- Toslink
- Transcoding
- Units
- UPnP
- USB
- VST
- WASAPI
- WAV
- Wave Out
Memory player
There is a strong believe in the computer audiophile community that any activity going on during play back has a negative impact on sound quality.
No access to the HD during playback by loading the song in memory first, is one of the tweaks. One thing is for sure, if there is no access to the HD during playback, you won't hear the head rattling!
The advantage to memory play is reduction of activity in the computer box during playback. Normally, data is read off of the disk into memory and then copied to the device, so there are two separate activities going on. With memory playback only copying data from memory to the device is happening. Ideally, the hard drive could be spun down as well, so there wouldn't even been any electrical and acoustic noise while listening to music.
The assumption is that less activity means a cleaner signal out of the computer box to the DAC. Whether this is true or not, and whether or not this affects the output of the DAC will depend on the specific system.
The primary disadvantage to memory playback is the time spent up front loading memory. There is also an extra cost of large amounts of memory, which will be measured in gigabytes when playing long hi-res playlists. For example, I have one double album that would require 5 GB just to hold the WAV file for the complete program.
If you want to give it a try, download the trial version of J River Media center.
You can very easily configure it to load the song in memory.