last night, hopping about YouTube, favorite/familiar music videos,
Google Chrome browser beat Firefox slightly, the reverse of the prior
night’s slight advantage to Firefox.
Sorry, no clues. Things may have changed in the last couple of years. When youtube stopped support for IE 6.0, I had to figure out a new browser. At that time, there was significant difference between the browsers. Maybe Chrome has improved?
SSD – this was just an idea to make the slimline quieter and reduce the computer’s power supply requirements. There may be a little improvement in sound quality because you are removing any electrical noise that hard drive motor, but that may not be noticeable.
CAD AND PHOTO EDITING really don’t require a powerful video card. They mostly depend on memory and cpu. It’s not until you get into stuff like 3D rendering or video editing / rendering or gaming that the video card becomes critical.
DIGITAL MUSIC – I’m not sure what you mean by “Isn’t the AV on the Macintosh motherboard involved?”. He’s just using the screen on the Macintosh to run media player software to “play” his music files or stream from a service such as Pandora. He’s likely doing a digital audio output using USB connection to a DAC.
If so, then no matter what streamer/lack of compression/___? isn’t the quality already set/converted/limited by the motherboard before a separate DAC?
Yes, if he’s streaming from Pandora or iHeartRadio or something, it is likely compressed. If he’s using Tidal, he may be streaming uncompressed and high-resolution audio.
Anything saved on HD is a certain digital quality. Any streaming service software is a certain quality. Still, going thru motherboard’s AV in/out?
You would think this and many still believe that data is data and there’s no difference in digital data between any platform. However, there is significant different in sound quality depending on what device is generating the digital pulses going to the DAC (or the digital pulses through HDMI to your Sony AVR). We get into a big discussion on getting a good clean power supply, circuits that clock the digital signal properly and the transmitter chips that generate the pulses onto the digital cable. There is a LOT of room to improve from a basic Macintosh laptop. Laptop is really not the best option here because it’s using a switching power supply adapter (unless you run it while on battery only). You cannot put in upgraded digital audio cards (such as JCAT USB card or a Pink Faun S/PDIF bridge card).
