I figured this is a sort of neglected, sort of interesting topic that deserves it’s own thread, and worth talking about (continued from my spur of the moment post). This will not be comprehensive, nor specific, but I think it’s good to get the discussion going and get some general ideas of where to start and what to look for. No guarantees that everything here is 100% safe or suggested by experts, because it’s not; I am a careful person myself, and these are tradeoffs with my system that I’m willing to make for my obsession. Please point out anything that’s too stupid if you see it though. None of this is for free, every change is a tradeoff, and it’s trading a bit of system usability, security, or stability for the sake of sound quality. Some will trade off more than others, and it’s up to you to figure out what tradeoffs you want to make through your own testing.
While going for a dedicated, purpose built, only audio streamer from a proper hifi brand may be the best way forward for most chasing ultimate digital performance, there’s plenty of reasons why that’s not always the most reasonable solution. Reasonable solutions aren’t the highest profile nor highest performing, but they can offer some serious satisfaction if you put the effort and thought into. Most use their computer for a variety of different things, from gaming to media consumption to work to just plain fucking around, and sometimes you either need or want your music playback coupled to that same device. In my case, my journey was started by the need to both play and record music using this computer, and a dedicated streamer would just not fit my equipment and workflow well. Others may want to find a way to reuse what they already have to create something better without spending a ton and keep their current way of life. A select mentally ill few may just enjoy tweaking so much that an uphill battle project like this is just appealing to them. Those freaks. But I’m all 3 at the moment, so I can’t really criticize.
This is not on how to fully optimize a home built audio exclusive streamer, but it’s also not only one or two small tweaks to make computer playback a bit more passable. These are some general guidelines and tweaks that when properly experimented on and combined will allow you to have your cake and eat it too when it comes to music playback from a general use computer, without sacrificing usability and general computing performance. This feels like element hunting, smashing computer tweaks and hardware together until you get a stable and effective result, hoping for something both significant and actually practical/useful. Sometimes you end up with a great sounding result, that unfortunately disappears in minutes after you realize you can’t use your computer like a normal computer. Sometimes you end up with a perfectly stable and usable computer, but one that’s a bit heavy and poisonous to musical enjoyment. Some tweaks and tests are cheap to try but time consuming, others are more expensive but higher probability in giving the result you desire. Either way, if you keep shooting, you may land near the island of usable yet high performing musical source that lasts long enough to enjoy and note down, close to the level of a purpose built streamer without the usability limitations. You also may not, the odds are against you, but it’s not impossible.
Bold statement, I know, but for myself, I feel like I was able to optimize my system from both a hardware and software level, using both consumer and hifi components, to a level that I really didn’t think was possible from a general computer. Your results will vary, greatly, depending on your exact setup, use case, and mentality/effort. I can’t cover such a wide swath of potential configuration in hardware, software, and use, so I’ll just touch on changes that are general enough to be applicable to most, yet still meaningful in most.
This is focused on getting a balance of high stability/low latency with moderate overall power draw and system noise, rather than lowest noise but most variable latency, or highest performance + low latency at the cost of pushing system noise and stability. I want to use my personal computer as a personal computer, yet still extract as much audio performance out of it as well during local file playback and audio editing. I do not stream from wan or lan, so I can’t offer much there, but tuning your network stack would realize larger gains I would imagine more than I focus on here. I am not looking for a car I can only drive on a track in best conditions, I want a daily driver that can largely crush it on a track when needed, but can still drive to the grocery store or work without too much stress or punishment. There are plenty of varying methodologies when it comes to getting this result, and there’s a lot of debate by those way more dedicated than I, so this will just be a small collection of what I prioritized for my own setup. I’m not going to flat out tell you how to get the exact same build I have, I’m too lazy for that, but the goal is also to encourage people to experiment with their own systems first and hopefully learn more than I have already in this endeavor on their next build.
Not in any real order.
Physical build considerations (without boutique hifi hardware):
- No RGB/lighting for case and components
- generates undesirable electrical noise and interference, begone vile gamer slop.
- High quality, oversized PSU
- you want to reduce the amount of electrical noise and improve quality of power for all components, go for platinum or titanium rated with at minimum a 25% oversize for optimal efficiency/performance.
- High quality barebones/non bloated motherboard
- better quality parts like caps, chipsets, more thought toward electrical isolation and thicker pcbs, more performance and stability focused, bonus points for non gamer. I feel like a smaller form factor might have the potential for less latency given shorter traces, however the closer packed nature theoretically may be less advantageous than something full size, dunno as I haven’t experimented with this personally yet.
- Tightest timing ram for your platform, at least 16gb but 32gb in 2 sticks if possible
- trying to balance speed and latency, with an audio focus low latency will generally take priority, along with having the ability to use it as either a ram disk or ram playback from your music player and avoid having swap if needed.
- CPU with single chiplet design focused on single core performance, lots of cache
- most audio is single threaded and will benefit from extra cache so it touches ram less, along with an integrated io controller. Try for 6-8 cores if you plan to disable SMT and mess with process/core affinity. I clearly have a preference toward modern ryzen (as long as it’s only 1 chiplet, if you have multiple try to force everything audio related onto one)
- Single MLC/TLC NVME drive
- will generally provide the lowest latency and fastest access over QLC and beyond and potentially lower electrical noise.
- Passive CPU cooler if possible, if not then use air tower, never water unless pump is powered externally
- reduce electrical noise in system and physical vibration, and physically quiet is good too.
- Powering case fans with external PSU
- reduce electrical noise in system
- Use integrated GPU if possible, if not then lower power dedicated if possible
- reduce electrical noise in system and reduce workload of system, I know this is hard if you play games, but pick a high quality card if you do plan to game, and undervolt.
- Avoid wifi and use wired internet if possible, with respected chipset on motherboard
- reduce electrical noise and interference in system, and reduce workload on system, NO POWERLINE, EVER. No bluetooth either, same with wireless keyboard and mice (maybe a little is ok, as a treat).
- Spacious, separated case layout
- the more distance you can get between potentially electrically noisy components, the better, and more space for passive cooling and expansion in the future.
- A separate isolated stand for your computer
- farther away from audio equipment without having to resort to a long digital cable, vibrationally coupled.
- EMI/EMF reduction techniques
- finding a way to reduce incoming and outgoing interference and noise can be benificial through various means like tape/coating/sheets/etc.
- Selecting the USB closest to your CPU for your playback device
- Make sure your music playback device is on it’s own dedicated USB controller with the shortest path to the CPU. A dedicated USB card will elevate things further if it’s quality, especially audiophile focused, will touch on that later.
- Isolating any connected cables and peripherals
- limit the amount of things connected to the computer if possible, use USB isolation devices for your input and non audio usb devices, reduce the amount of noise that could flow into the computer.
- Using quality displays
- I’ve had alot of shitty monitors over time that buzz and whine and negatively impact anything around them, and while hard to test, make sure if you get anything seemingly dirty to send it back and try for something else.
- Careful internal cable routing
- Doing whatever you can to get everything away from the power supply cables, maybe using a case with multiple sections or running it as far away from everything else as you can, paying careful attention to keep it away from PCIe, USB, and storage devices. Nicer power supplies will also have thicker more high quality cables, which are more cumbersome but worthwhile to deal with.
BIOS Tweaks (that generally won’t noticeably negatively impact general computing performance):
- Disable Spread Spectrum
- disable undesirable distribution of electrical noise in system which also increases jitter, this setting exists for compliance, not quality, will not impact compute performance.
- Disable C States/CPU Sleep
- disable core sleeping and varying performance states which negatively impact latency, will also improve compute performance at cost of increased power use and heat.
- Disable EIST (speedstep, speedshift)/CoolnQuiet (CBS)
- disable variable CPU control that negatively impacts latency, will also improve compute performance at cost of increased power use and heat.
- Disable EPU/Power saving chips
- disable variable motherboard/system power control that impacts latency, will also improve compute performance at cost of increased power use and heat.
- Disable virtualization/iommu (if unused)
- reduces overall system overhead which will reduce latency.
- Disable QPI/UPI Power Management
- keeps link at max performance and non variable which reduces latency and increased compute performance.
- Set LLC to middle/balanced setting
- keeps voltage consistent and stable, improves potential performance if not at extremes at the cost of a bit more power and heat.
- Set CPU & DRAM Power Phase Control to middle/balanced
- keeps VRM consistent and stable power, improves potential performance if not at extremes at the cost of a bit more power and heat.
- Disable Power Decay Mode
- keeps CPU voltage regulator from moving to low power, improves potential performance at cost of bit more power and heat.
- Set Idle Power-In Response to Typical
- keep system from reducing power usage at idle increasing overall consistency.
- Disable UNUSED features/devices (motherboard audio, networking, sata ports, pci slots, thunderbolt/USB controllers, etc)
- reduces system workload and electrical noise, improving latency
- Disable Memory Scrubbing
- improves memory latency at cost of less error correction but not a big concern.
- Disable ASPM (pci power management)
- increases PCIe power stability/performance by preventing lower power state, improve latency.
- Disable any integrated remote management chips/features
- reduces system workload and noise
- Disable fastboot
- ensures hardware and software boots cleanly each time, improving stability
- Disable EDAC/ECC memory (if you have it, if you can)
- removes extra latency and overhead if applicable (this is also part of software tweaking), I’m not convinced ECC is good to have here.
- Set Uncore Frequency to max
- improves overall system latency by keeping frequency high for i/o, memory, and cache.
- Disable SMI/SMM and ME if applicable
- removes system overhead and background tasks, this is a bit more convoluted but can be done on some systems and also part of software tweaking.
- Enable HPET
- increases accuracy of system timing, improving latency in some situations.
- Disable any RGB or lighting control
- reduces electrical noise and overhead.
- Enable resizable BAR
- On some systems this might be a bad thing, but I think if you’re using a PCIe USB card it could actually work in it’s favor, though I haven’t fully tested this myself.
- Disable any link between the OS for mfg software
- reduces unnecessary overhead and latency in some cases if applicable.
- Disable any local AI models, tau boost, other weird mfg specific things
- see above, it could be anything.
More Painful BIOS Tweaks (that will cause a bit to a decent compute performance hit, but still be usable in most cases):
- Disable SMT/Hyperthreading
- improve latency at the cost of compute performance, potentially drastic performance hit in some workloads.
- Disable any turbo boost, variable speed, P states for CPU, manually set voltage as well as base rated clocks, a slight undervolt could be beneficial in some cases
- improve stability and latency at cost of performance, noticeable performance hit depending on CPU boost config.
- Set ram voltage and speed manually to base XMP, then focus on timing but don’t neglect overall speed, a slight undervolt could be beneficial in some cases
- improve latency at the cost of speed, smaller but meaningful difference, depends on the platform a lot.
- Drop PCIe speeds to 4.0 or even 3.0 on storage and experiment what sounds better
- reduce overall system electrical noise and workload at the cost of system and storage speed, I feel most mixed on this one.
I would say these are generally applicable to most systems, there’s a lot more fine tuning you can do with each platform, but as mentioned that’s too much effort and scope to really cover, but it’s worth poking around and experimenting yourself. There’s so many things that have been added or changed in modern BIOS and system config that I’m sure there’s some things that are skipped over that could make a noticeable difference, it just requires people who are willing to waste time to find them lol. I could mention more extreme things like disabling networking entirely, removing things from motherboards, and so on, but that’s approaching more streamer than usable computer. Please let me know what you find here, and if something needs to be changed. A lot of this is from direct experimentation on my own systems, but what works for me may not work for you, and vice versa. I’m also sure that some of this deserves a bit better explaining or is a little sloppy, but it’s good enough for now, I’ll update when I have more mental clarity.
This separator is so I can talk about some of the more audiophile hardware that also makes a drastic difference to the experience, that’s worth investing in. Not to the realm of converting this to be boutique like a streamer, but things easily integrated in a system like this to take it to the next level. I will keep this brief, because there’s only a few things that I think are needed, before it makes more sense to just go for full streamer and not general use PC.
- Dedicated audiophile USB card
- something from JCAT, Pink Faun, Taiko, Afterdark, etc will really do wonders for the quality of your output, make sure to use the PCIe closest to your CPU and that the rest of your system is optimized properly, the most important thing to consider.
- Dedicated audiophile network card (if you stream only)
- I don’t think this is worth it unless you’re streaming your music from the network, but otherwise potentially similar impact to adding the USB cards.
- Dedicated audiophile PSU for that USB card
- basically a requirement for one of these cards to be worthwhile, it’s not that the PSU is doing all the heavy lifting, it’s just that the cards don’t shine without it either. Pick the best PSU mfg of your choice, the second most important thing to consider.
- Dedicated audiophile Master Clock for that USB card (if applicable)
- if they have the option to take a clock in, it can be a good way to further boost performance down the line, but it can be really pricey to get a good clock and starts to border into “might as well streamer range”
- Dedicated audiophile ATX psu replacement
- a few select companies like hdplex or jcat make native options for this, but a custom psu is also an option, but once again cost wise this borders on just get a dedicated streamer complexity and price range.
- (This space intentionally left blank)
- MAYBE dedicated audiophile SSD + PSU
- I really want to try this since there’s a few out there, and it’s a part of the system that is critical, so the returns just may be worth it, but because I can’t test, I can’t say.
Notice how I’ve focused on USB, I know there are PCIe cards that can output SPDIF, but to be honest I’d rather leave that to a higher quality DDC down the line and use one of these USB cards in conjunction with one, as I think there’s more flexibility and potential for improvement. You could use a USB reclocker/isolator out of a motherboard port, but I genuinely think if you’ve optimized the rest of your system, a card + psu will do more for less.
