Computer for music only?

Actually I take all that back. Running Quicken on my PC and examining my hifi equipment purchase history while listening to music is a terrible combo. Lots of jitter, so to speak.

Yeap, all power amps measuring the same sound the same, all bit-perfect software players sound the same, yadda-yadda. Ignorance is a bliss...for some.

Lewinskih01

I in no way was making any attack on you. In all my reading and experience I simply had never heard of such a thing. Certainly many discuss minimizing CPU load and noises but unless you are listening and ripping at the same time I cannot imagine any issue causing audible degradation.

There's absolutely no reason a modern computer has to be dedicated to music playback. Some playback software can be more sensitive than others to other processes running, but audio playback is not CPU or disk activity intensive. Should you run Photoshop, burn a DVD and download an HD movie while listening to Pure Music with upsampling? Probably not, but going to the opposite extreme of having no other operations active is overkill.

Mwheelerk,

I didn't take your question as an attack. A fair challenge, which is a very healthy thing to have in a place like this. Hopefully my post from 4/6 addressed to you didn't come through as defensive. Was not my intention, anyway.