Sound improvement through software: a suggestion worth trying with Amarra

[OpSpl]

In the never-ending quest for the best possible sound without breaking the bank, I recently remembered that someone, in this very forum, had suggested we could try and play with the priority of the processes at the operating system level. Well, I’m not a computing engineer, nor nerdy enough to play with command lines in the Unix console. But in one of those forehead slapping moments, I happened to connect the former suggestion with the capabilities of App Tamer. App Tamer is a program designed to put to sleep background applications you are not actually using right now. It also allows you to adjust the priorities of the processes. It’s kind of an interactive “Activity Monitor”. You can try it free for 15 days and fiddle with the different settings. But the most radical twist, and dramatically sound improving, is this killer feature: tick the “Gaming Mode” checkbox and come back to Amarra (Cmd-Tab, or click on the Amarra window). Then, what happens is that Amarra gets to work undisturbed by irrelevant (to music playing) background tasks. And, in my experience, the improvement in sound is really not small: more small details, more microinformation, instantly translating into more life-like sound. What happens also, is that the whole Amarra user interface seems to freeze. Needless to say, so does iTunes. So, you have to reserve this hack for serious listening — from cache and in playlist mode. What I find also interesting, is that the user interface of Amarra seems to be so separate from the sound engine that the sound engine is the foreground task and the user interface a background task. Not a casual fact, IMHO.

 

 

Discussion: I know there are disbelievers who argue that a modern computer has more then enough processing power to animate simultaneously email + downloading + uploading + disk access + desktop animations + video rendering… yes, yes, BUT: the processing is shared between the tasks and, macroscopically, it doesn’t matter if a download or an upload stream is interrupted for some microseconds. Not so with a digital stream meant to represent a soundwave. I’m pretty sure the only situation where this phenomenon is irrelevant is when the DAC (I mean the hifi gear, not the actual chip) is designed in a way to be immune to the temporality of the incoming bits by buffering and reclocking them. It’s not the case with mine, that’s why I think I can still improve sound with such tweaks. It’s also possible that the more powerful the computer (CPU + bus + memory access +…) , the less obvious the effect of tweaking process priorities. But it’s interesting to notice that even the asynchronous USB of the Halide Bridge seems to benefit from a steadier stream of bits. Or is it still another effect? All I can say is that I — and my wife too — can definitely hear the sound improvement and that it all makes a lot of sense.

 

 

NB: I’m pretty sure other music players (PM, Decibel, etc.) might also benefit from this hack. But I haven’t tested yet, as Amarra remains my current favorite.

 

 

I welcome your feedback and I’ll be happy to read some prose more technically grounded than mine.

 

 

Olivier Spinnler

 

 

Switzerland