Other than unnecessary personal vitriol, I wonder about the discussion in performance improvements, and how it impacts music reproduction technology.
Here are a few personal opinions: * When even Intel declares Moore's Law as in hiatus, you know semiconductor advances have slowed a fair amount when it comes to some design parameters - but not all of them. I think the major trend there has been the focus on mobility and low power requirements. Hence the race to make personal computers twice as fast by throwing in extra GHz has slowed down a lot. That said - the *huge* benefit of that has been that now we have highly mobile personal devices that allow us to enjoy a degree of music quality anytime-anywhere that was only attainable with very esoteric and highly static gear not that long ago. I recall listening to music on a very good Sony Walkman back in the 80s, and damn, compared to what we have today it was probably garbage. Let's not over-romanticize the audio past. * My own home desktop computer-server is based on 2010 technology. Top of the line Intel stuff back then. I think from 1992 to 2010 I probably upgraded my home PC every 2-3 years or so. I liked to build my own machines. Still do, but truly the reasons to do so these days are not as clear. My 2010 desptop still performs very well. I have changed most peripheral devices (bigger SSD, bigger HD, more RAM, faster graphics) but the core system is the same, and performs very well even with current benchmarks. I *will* build a new machine in the next year or so, but it will not be for performance reasons - multimedia works perfectly well with that I have. And I am not a gamer. 24/192 audio is something that can be served by very, very old CPU and memory tech. You could build a well -performing LMS with pretty much any computer you find in an old box. Performance hasn't been a gatekeeper to audio performance in many, many years. Fact is it is pretty low CPU cycle stuff. * As to networking and bandwidth... I haven't been in an environment where music challenges stuff in a long time. My tablet gets 200M download and 12M upload speeds over wireless in my home. In a few years, your smartphone will support 1G download speeds, call it LTE or 5G. Not that it matters for music, even if Tidal decides to stream everything at 24/192 at that point in time. :-) As to right now, the fact our beloved SB boxen and LMS servers can deal with 24/192 in our homes, with technology that is pretty dated at this point in time, indicates music is not a resource intensive app in this day and age. * And, when it comes to audio nerd gear (I am talking about us here with an old fashioned audio shrine), I think there have been some very significant advances over the years. Fundamentally, a speaker is still put together the same way. I especially think today is an amazing time to put together budget systems, or systems up to $10k or so. The quality you get from those was unattainable 20 years ago unless you threw far more $ at things. Then again, I could probably live with my 1999 vintage Accuphase E306v amplifier for life, Ncore modules be damned. :-) If it wasn't so damn bulky. :-) *Arguably the biggest advance, and one that still hasn't sunk into the old fashioned brains of most audio enthusiasts, is software controlled and DSP based room optimization. Raise your hand if you have one! (Looking around and sees one or two hands). See... we're an old fashioned-bunch. In summary, I think the audio world has changed by leaps and bounds. Some of the early changes were indeed driven by CPU power and storage capacity (my current 475GB music library would have been very daunting in the mid 90s :-)). But I think these days it's been all driven by the capabilities of mobile devices more than anything else. Our audio shrines are pretty old tech, both in what's inside and what's required from the periphery... ...pablo Server: Virtual Machine (on VMware Workstation 12) running Ubuntu 16.04 + LMS 7.9 System: SB Touch --optical->- Benchmark DAC2HGC --AnalysisPlus Oval Copper XLR->- NAD M22 Power Amp --AnalysisPlus Black Mesh Oval->- Totem Element Fire Other Rooms: 2x SB Boom; 1x SB Radio; 1x SB Classic-> NAD D7050 -> Totem DreamCatcher + Velodyne Minivee Sub Computer audio: workstation --USB->- audioengine D1 -> Grado PS500e/Shure 1540 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ pablolie's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=3816 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=106593 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
