I did not say that. I said more than once that a general purpose computer is not the best choice for an end point, because it is too noisy.
I also say that the Linux audiophile distributions are designed from the ground only for sound rendering. In an OS like GentooPlayer, everything is optimized for that.
For instance, there are various profiles to choose between in order to reduce further the CPU load by reducing the number of active ARM CPUs. You can disable all the features of the RBi that are unnecessary for the sound : Wifi, HDMI output, active LEDs, etc… SysOptuimizer is a joke in comparison.
If you want to tweak further, you can tune precisely the frequencies of the CPUs of the Rbi…
There are many Linux kernels that were desgined to optimize the sound, and you can choose among them the one that you like better.
And you can run the whole GentooPlayer OS, including the players and the renderers in RAM! Everything is loaded in RAM!
How could you imagine Audirvana doing something similar with macOS?
Okay… I think you are describing the lack of mechanical noise… I would agree that none is best… If you are talking about platform architecture electronic and electromechanical noise that affects the data-flow in the computer architecture… then this is just a matter of how a device architecture is designed… I will agree that better design will generally produce better results…
The Apple products take mechanical noise from the fans, very seriously… The fan on my 2016 MacBook Pro very rarely kicks-in or the RPM’s are managed so to be inaudible when using Audirvana Studio in my close-proximity scenario… My mechanical music-library HDD is the most disruptive noise and in my headphone-centric scenario it is inaudible… I am planning to replace the HDD with a SSD…
There are no fans indeed, but I’m not talking about mechanical noise. And no one uses streamers with hard drives.
When you eliminate all unnecessary computing tasks, you hear the difference immediately. When you run everything in RAM without any disc access, you hear a great improvement in sound quality.
The slightest computing task affects the sound, and the Mac was not designed as an audiophile computer. Neither its OS.
The audiophile Linux OS’ were designed specifically for that, and they exploit the hardware, the Rbi, in an optimized manner.
All computing devices create ripples in the power-supplies that can affect data-flow…
A System on a Chip (SoC) for most developers is an ARM FPGA device they exploit by the nature of their software running on it… This is the same for Apple Inc. M1, M2 SoC’s
Audirvana is running from RAM and in the case of the M1 and M2 SoC’s it is symbiotic to the Core Audio path, which is no different than any other player running on an SoC architecture having to interface to the ARM chip hardware API’s and supporting hardware platform of the device, the system is running on…
The MacBook Air has no fan… and the Mac Studio is designed to sit on a producers desk…
We have at home two M1 Macs, and two Intel Macs. And I am a Mac user since the late '80.
Believe me that if the Mac could sound better, I would not waste time and money with other devices for sound rendering.
As we have made clearly evident… It is a matter of how these devices are employed under particular circumstances and application scenarios and network configurations, will have great influence on the playback performance of the amalgamation of selected components, that produce a subjective audio signature…
Yes, it’s a matter of how they are employed.
There are endless possible configurations, and the exploration of the options and the performances is part of the fun.
