Thanks for the link. But there is nothing there to improve audio fidelity. Or at least nothing on purpose
.
This is a much longer topic. I will give an introduction here but perhaps we should have a new thread on this.
The way an audio or most devices work in an operating system like Linux, Windows and Mac works is that you give them something to do, they go and do that and meanwhile the operating system runs other jobs. When they are done, the devices ring a bell like a front desk bell asking for attention of the operating system. That way, the CPU is not wasting time just waiting for them to do something. Playing for example a chunk of audio samples in a DAC could take milliseconds. The OS could execute millions of instructions during that time, running for example your browser and email instead of waiting to feed the DAC the next chunk of data.
Another characteristic of audio playback is that it is "real time." If you are playing CD, you need to feed the DAC 44.1 samples of two bytes each for each channel. Do less of this and the DAC will run out of data to play and will pause. That pause if short sounds like a glitch and if long, literally silence. If you take a very old PC with little memory and hook it up to your DAC and play something and then start say a game, you can easily see this happening. A dedicated CD player doesn't have this issue because it is only a CD player. An operating system is "multi-tasking" and can in theory run behind.
Going back to your Linux distro, it addresses the interrupt latency (first issue) by boasting how much better it is than Windows. It provides these measurements, first for their Linux "running in real-time mode":
We see lightning fast response in that the latency, or the time taken for the CPU to respond to a device is down to just a few microseconds. In contrast they show this fro Windows (different program but same idea):
In Windows we see latencies or time to respond to a device of nearly 1000 microseconds or about 500 times worse than the Linux example above.
Seems like the case is made or is it? Well, it isn't
. Let's go back to the hotel example. You ring the bell and the person shows up in 10 seconds. You would care if it is 10 seconds or 100 seconds. But what if he came back in 10.01 seconds instead of 10? You would not notice or care, right? Same is here.
Audio devices are very slow. And they employ buffering which means they hold on to data they are playing. So we only need to give them attention once in a while compared to the lightning speed of a CPU. Let's make an extreme case of giving one second worth of data to the DAC at a time. In that case, being able to respond to the DAC in 1000 *micro* seconds that Windows does is lightning fast. Note how the DPC checker in the second graph for Windows says clearly that the system is functional enough for audio!
We have proof of this working as countless people use their standard Mac/Windows machine for audio playback and we don't have reports of glitches and pauses. Yes, it can happen. Lee had a DAC that was doing this and turned out the problem was the visualization (random graphics playing with music) that his media player was generating. Turned that off and the problem was gone.
Importantly all of this impacts *functionality* not fidelity. If these problems exist, you will know it because of the pops and glitches. It will not manifest itself in audiophile qualities. Either you can keep up with the conveyer belt of audio samples going to the DAC or not. If you don't the parts, or audio samples, fall on the floor. The quality of the parts won't be impacted one way or the other. In that sense, nothing in the feature list of that Linux distribution that aids in fidelity department.
Now there could be a fidelity difference due to system activity but that has huge dependency on hardware and at any rate, nothing is documented there to demonstrate any improvements are there.
You might ask but what is the down side of having better real-time performance anyway? Well one main one: you get locked into a strange operating system that may not be supported in the future or with the devices you use. And a secondary one is security flaws. There are vulnerabilities discovered in Linux as well as Windows and Mac. The latter two come with frequent updates to plug them. But your little embedded computer sitting in your home network with full view of all other computers is not patched or updated by these companies. Is the risk high? No. It is actually very small but should it happen, the consequences can be high.
Now, I don't want to pour cold water over this
. If you are a person like Mike who likes to do this kind of thing, then is is a cool option. But if you are not the type, I don't think it is a wise path. I think you will be better off with a Mac Mini or a silent Windows machine.
