Windows vs Linux: round 2 (Off Topic)

by Eddie , Sunday, August 12, 2007, 22:38 (6122 days ago)

Hi all,

Five months ago I was at Bert's place to compare the audio performance of a laptop using GC under Windows XP and another one using XMMS under Linux. At that time GC was the winner on points, but XMMS was not made for high-end audio and was not optimally tuned.

Since that time a lot of progress has been made on both fronts. Windows has changed to Vista and PeterSt developed engine 3 for it, supposedly much better than the previous ones. Meanwhile the Linux camp changed into real-time operating systems and a professional audio player called brutus.

On saturday, august 11, the second meeting took place, again at Bert's studio. Present were Bert, Klaus and his wife, Peter and myself. We listened more than four hours to different settings and combinations. Far too much to give an accurate description of all details, I caNot even remember them all.

So just some overall impressions here. Both systems made big progress in a relatively short time. The general impression was that brutus definitely had a more detailed and deeper bass, more high frequency and a wider soundstage. On the other hand GC-3 was more detailed in the midrange, e.g. on voices. The question about which soundstage is better could not be answered.

A few other remarkable points: brutus sounded better without a hardware volume control (the volume can then be set on the laptop). We were all amazed by the large and unexplainable differences between different settings. Klaus wrote a message to diyAudio ( http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&postid=1276574#post1276574 ). You can also find a lot of information there about Linux/brutus, if you are interested.

My conclusions:
1. computer playback is by now miles ahead of what can be achieved with very expensive, commercial CD-players.
2. the progress is to a large extend achieved by trial-and-error. There appears to be virtually no information on what should be done on hardware and software in order to get the maximum performance out of a CD.
3. the approaches under Windows and Linux are very different. In case of Windows you buy a computer and the software, you can play your music and that is it. If you go for Linux/brutus you must install the realtime kernel and run from a command-line screen, you may want to convert all your CD's to 48 Khz, etc. So the second option will cost less money and much more time, but it will give also an enormous amount of opportunities to tweak your system to your demands.
4. This time, to my taste, the winner, again on points, was brutus.

I finish with an interesting question that a collegue posed to me once: "Eddie, what is more important for you: beauty or truth?". My first thought was, of course, thruth. But if you think longer you realize that it is often impossible to realize thruth, so what is left then is to go for beauty. It seems that this is the situation that we are facing in high-end music playback at the moment.

Kind regards,
Eddie

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