Optimising a Windows computer for audio playback.

[Tim]

I don't think this has been discussed here before, but the Computer Audio Design website has a lot of very useful information regarding setting up and optimising a Windows 7/8 computer for audio playback.



Computer Audio Design sells the above high end DAC which I have no experience of and if any one is interested, you should check the site out. Its certainly very stylish and I really like the design, however, this post is mainly to assist people who may want to improve their Windows audio player, but don’t really know where to start and are maybe a little intimidated about shutting down services or poking around in the registry. There are some very handy guides in this section, which you can check out: http://www.computeraudiodesign.com/computer-setup/

In addition to the guides, there is also a script which you can run on a Windows 8 machine, which shuts down and disables a large number of services and drivers in the operating system. It should be noted that unlike Fidelizer, these changes are permanent and remain on the system after a reboot and are intended for use on an audio playback only computer. You can of course go backwards and turn the services back on and there is a script on the site to do this too. If you use the script on a general purpose computer, it may not function normally, so make sure you understand this before running the script. Additionally, it is also very important you take steps to carry out some simple safeguards to your system, by making either a full backup or disk image (recommended), backing up the registry, creating a Windows system repair disk and at the very least creating a System Restore Point. After you create a system restore point, ensure you reboot your machine before running the script. If you have never created a Restore Point manually before (it's simple) there is a guide from MS here: System Restore

I have mentioned it before, but with the low price of small hard drives for the O/S in a music server, it can make sense to have a spare. I have two, a primary drive and a test drive which is a clone of the original. The clone is where I do all my testing, so if I mess it up there's no harm done and I just slot my original drive in, so I can still play music. When I am happy that any changes are both worthwhile and stable, I them implement the changes to my primary drive. The script is also open source and can also be found on the website. To allay any possible fears about running a script, I have opened it and read through it and you can do the same using a program like notepad, to review all the changes being made.

I think this is fantastic work from Scott and goes a long way to helping people get the most from their Windows machine, with very little effort. It was one of the things I was in the process of doing for a blog, but he beat me to it.

Finally, just a quick thanks to CAD for doing all this work, for making it open source and for allowing me to reproduce it on AoS.

Tim

NB: Just a final reminder, please ensure you take the safeguards mentioned above before implementing any changes to your system. If you are unsure how to, just Google them, there are numerous step by step instruction guides for everything I have suggested

[John]

Thanks This looks really good

[kenworthy100]

Thanks Tim that looks to be a very useful and informative resource

[Krisbee]

Eek! 49 pages. Linux would fit on one page Tim. Just kidding ....

[Clive]

I used the script a couple of days ago, I seem to be one of the few people to have problems..my system wouldn't boot. Fortunately it wasn't too traumatic to restore the system. So do please ensure you have some way back if all goes pear shaped. A spare clone drive would be a great way.

[Themis]

Place your hard drive on a hard surface like glass or stone and listen to your favourite track.
Now find something soft, like a new sponge or even a pile of clothes. Place the hard drive on that and listen again. A HDD that is spinning around at 7200 rpm is like a turntable. It will vibrate. Trying to reduce or absorb that vibration improves sound quality.

I read this and... stopped reading the rest.


I guess I will come back later, and constructively enumerate all of the "opinions" stated as "facts" on this paper. More soon.

[Rothchild]

Tonight I will mostly be A/B/Xing files in a folder against files in the root directory!

There's some good info in here and there's some stuff that's been handed down (via Black Viper presumably) from the ark (or at least Win2K / XP).

I recognise many of them because it's the stuff we used to do to our DAWs (Digital Audio Workstation) for music production, when processing power and disk throughput for multichannel audio with effects was still marginal. Most of these tweaks were developed to minimise processor use or the chances of other programs trying to access the HD when recording the 'killer take', generally they have very little to do with sonics. (indeed the one tweak that probably will help is played down, windows system sounds are all 8bit11khz and can cause your soundcard / interface to try switching sample rates from what you'd set it to!)

2 channel audio (even at 24/96/192) is, these days, a walk in the park for most computers available (and that probably includes phones too!) and folk will get more improvement out of attending to first principles before disabling their firewall and antivirus. Good power, short runs of audio cable, trying not to mix audio and power cabling etc will IMO yield the big wins, most of the rest is just gilding the lilly.

[Themis]

2 channel audio (even at 24/96/192) is, these days, a walk in the park for most computers available (and that probably includes phones too!) and folk will get more improvement out of attending to first principles before disabling their firewall and antivirus. Good power, short runs of audio cable, trying not to mix audio and power cabling etc will IMO yield the big wins, most of the rest is just gilding the lilly.

Spot on !

[Tim]

Good power, short runs of audio cable, trying not to mix audio and power cabling etc will IMO yield the big wins . . .

Absolutely and its been said before by myself and Gary (Gazjam) that those elements are essential and I don't think anyone would disagree with that. This is to help those along that want to tweak a computer further, but don't have the knowledge - its a helpful guide for those new to this, who haven't been dabbling with it for the last few years. There's nothing in there that's new to me, but there will be for a lot of other people

I read this and... stopped reading the rest

So you have tried it then and noticed no difference Dimitri?

[Themis]

So you have tried it then and noticed no difference Dimitri?

Hi Tim,

no, I haven't tried it because it is useless for me. I'm not new to computers, and I know for having used hard disks for about 33 years (which is more than 17 million minutes or 1 billion seconds) that they never ever have read different data than the ones that are already on them. Except when they are broken, but then, they don't read any data at all !

Let me give you an example so that people who don't know about computers could understand:

You have a page in a forum. Let's call this forum "The Art of Sound" and the page "Optimising-a-Windows-computer-for-audio-playback".
The forum is hosted on a server in the UK in Scotland - Glasgow by Iomart Group Plc. The page is stored on a hard disk on one of their servers.
My computer is in south France, Montpellier.
I ask my favourite browser to display this page. I press Enter.
My computer is not doing just that. Right now I'm downloading Dragon's Prophet (it has been downloading for 5 hours, there are still 2 hours left, it's a big game, hope it will be a good one) , while my sever plays "Fritz Reiner and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra".
My demand goes through my wifi, then to my router.
It actually crossed tens of switches, kilometres of cable, already several computers before reaching the Montpellier main server that connects to the Internet backbone (that is, the main line). All these computers have hundreds of hard disks.
Up to then, everything is ok.
My demand goes through 18 different servers, still more kilometres, still more switches, still more hard disks.
It reaches Glascow. A miracle, it arrived as it should ! Not a single bit was altered (otherwise my request could not be treated) !!

But it's ok. It reached the Iomart server in Glascow.

The server responds and sends back the page. The response of the server (that is, the page itself) is much bigger than my request (which was just the address of the page). The response is about 150,000 characters.
The page goes all the way back through the hundreds of kilometres of cable, the tens/hundreds of switches, the 18 servers.
The page reaches my local DSLAM (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital...ss_multiplexer), it is just 6 kilometres from my home.
It crosses the last 6km of cables and switches, reaches my modem.
The page dispatches to my computer.
My computer (still downloading Dragon's Prophet, the go-and-back of the request took less than a second) possibly swaps some of the work to disk and starts buffering the answer.
The buffering is necessary, because the answer is big (IP communication packets are smaller than the page size). The page comes in small pieces.
My computer, finally has got the last piece. It gathers all the pieces together.
By the way, it's not easy to show the answer to the screen. I invite you to try to imagine what is needed to be done before the 150,000 characters (bytes) display in a readable way to my screen. A hard work, almost as hard as getting the page.

Whatever. The page displays on my screen.

And I look very carefully through my screen. Trying to find what was altered with all this go-and-back, these thousands of kilometres of cable, these switches, tens of computers on the way with their hard disks.
Hmm... apparently nothing. Because I can still read the page, everything is in order and all the letters are in their correct place.

Good. It seems to work. And it has been working for 33 years.

Now, could I try taking out my hard disk and put it on a soft cloth ? Yes I could.
But I wonder what could it possibly additionally bring to me than the correct page I have on my screen ? An even more correct page ?

So... some may think that all this is magic. Actually, I know it is not, because I am of the ones that have built all this. That have conceived the necessary protocols and software needed to accomplish these operations without putting any cloth around your hard disks.
This would be a bit longer to explain why it is not magic, but trust me, there's no magic in this.