Interesting, what release of xp? Thank you for sharing!
mac vs pc
Wondering if anyone else has compared mac vs pc?
I used a mac mini with bootcamp and a hiface m2tech bnc > benchmark dac1. Foobar2000 with kernel streaming and xp, and itunes on both 10.5 and 10.6 (tested both) - I have multiple mac minis.
First a bit about windows and playback:
Out of the box windows is not bit perfect and is doing poor quality up-sampling. Itunes on a pc cannot output bit-perfect like the mac version can. As stated above I used foobar2000 to get around this.
10.5 vs 10.6:
I believe that snow lep is better at not automatically padding word length to 24 bit, it not figures out that it should stick to 16... which is likely the reason sl sounds better. Out of the box 10.4 and 10.5 set output to 24 bit instead of 16 bit, doing poor quality conversion. Last time I tried 10.6 it got it right at 16 bit.
After setting 10.5 to 16 bit / 44.1 to match snow lep they sounded the same. (using audio midi setup with itunes closed, then opening itunes per benchmark recommendations)
A things stand now:
mac vs windows sound better out of the box on a mac with itunes and is much much easier to setup.
after you setup windows right with asio / kernel streaming that sounds better than the mac. This is unfortunate since I prefer macs as a computer, and the mac setup is so much easier. I really wanted the mac to sound better!
Im curious mac users has anyone else compared with bootcamp running on the same hardware? using different hardware is not really fair since individual design characteristics come into play (how the fans and cpu throttles effect noise on the +5v computer power and usb signals)
I used a mac mini with bootcamp and a hiface m2tech bnc > benchmark dac1. Foobar2000 with kernel streaming and xp, and itunes on both 10.5 and 10.6 (tested both) - I have multiple mac minis.
First a bit about windows and playback:
Out of the box windows is not bit perfect and is doing poor quality up-sampling. Itunes on a pc cannot output bit-perfect like the mac version can. As stated above I used foobar2000 to get around this.
10.5 vs 10.6:
I believe that snow lep is better at not automatically padding word length to 24 bit, it not figures out that it should stick to 16... which is likely the reason sl sounds better. Out of the box 10.4 and 10.5 set output to 24 bit instead of 16 bit, doing poor quality conversion. Last time I tried 10.6 it got it right at 16 bit.
After setting 10.5 to 16 bit / 44.1 to match snow lep they sounded the same. (using audio midi setup with itunes closed, then opening itunes per benchmark recommendations)
A things stand now:
mac vs windows sound better out of the box on a mac with itunes and is much much easier to setup.
after you setup windows right with asio / kernel streaming that sounds better than the mac. This is unfortunate since I prefer macs as a computer, and the mac setup is so much easier. I really wanted the mac to sound better!
Im curious mac users has anyone else compared with bootcamp running on the same hardware? using different hardware is not really fair since individual design characteristics come into play (how the fans and cpu throttles effect noise on the +5v computer power and usb signals)