I'm a hardcore vinyl and CD listener but I've recently dabbled with plumbing an old Dell laptop via an original Audioquest Dragonfly into my main rig to play FLAC files, with decent results. In fact pound for pound it's astonishing and certainly beats the days of starting out with a PL-12D...
Only one hitch - playback has a momentary judder once every three or four minutes. Maybe it's what you'd call jitter, only a quarter of a second glitch. I've stripped the laptop software down to the absolute basics for running Foobar alone (literally, I've deleted or decommissioned every program including not even displaying the clock). The laptop is plugged in via a Tacima mains conditioner and only playing files on its internal hard drive, not an external one.
The simple answer would seem to be the laptop itself, which I bought c. 2006 and so is clearly olde spec, but as I say it's not running any competing programs so I'd expect it to be able to get through a song without a hitch.
Any ideas?
I'm not anticipating a significant shift to digital any time soon but if the diagnosis is the laptop then I'd appreciate a view on a newer Microsoft OS model that's stable for music with no other frills please.
Cheers,
Pete