Gearslutz.com - View Single Post - Can computer hardware effect your DAW's sound?

Keyplayer · 15th August 2004

I've been running (quite pleasantly, I might add) Nuendo 1.6 on a Pentium 3/933 with 512mb of RAM and a 9652 soundcard.

Overloads on the CPU have been successfully avoided by mixing on a DA7 with outboard FX, dynamics, and printing plug FX to the wave files.

Anyway, I'm ready to upgrade. I wanted to go for an AMD Dual Opteron 64 System. But sticker shock sent me back to my little P3. So I decided to just go to a P4/2.8GB with 2gigs of RAM and 400gigs of 7200RPM drives.

A friend of mine just built such a computer and is going to be out of town for 3 weeks. So he loaned me his tower to try it out. If I liked it, then I would purchase those components and upgrade my tower to those specs.

This afternoon we swapped over my soundcard
and drives to his P4/XP Pro/Optimized for Nuendo tower. I pulled up a project that I was working on this morning. EVERYTHING SOUNDS DIFFERENT!

One file sounded way brighter than it had yesterday. The one from this morning sounds a lot bassier. All I was expecting was more speed and ease of work flow. This is really bizaar to me.

Can the computer components really effect the sound? I can understand software and programs having these types of impacts, but the hardware running it???? Is this possible, or is something else going on?

15th August 2004	#1
Keyplayer Gear maniac Joined: Jul 2004 Location: USA Posts: 190 Thread Starter	Can computer hardware effect your DAW's sound? I've been running (quite pleasantly, I might add) Nuendo 1.6 on a Pentium 3/933 with 512mb of RAM and a 9652 soundcard. Overloads on the CPU have been successfully avoided by mixing on a DA7 with outboard FX, dynamics, and printing plug FX to the wave files. Anyway, I'm ready to upgrade. I wanted to go for an AMD Dual Opteron 64 System. But sticker shock sent me back to my little P3. So I decided to just go to a P4/2.8GB with 2gigs of RAM and 400gigs of 7200RPM drives. A friend of mine just built such a computer and is going to be out of town for 3 weeks. So he loaned me his tower to try it out. If I liked it, then I would purchase those components and upgrade my tower to those specs. This afternoon we swapped over my soundcard and drives to his P4/XP Pro/Optimized for Nuendo tower. I pulled up a project that I was working on this morning. EVERYTHING SOUNDS DIFFERENT! One file sounded way brighter than it had yesterday. The one from this morning sounds a lot bassier. All I was expecting was more speed and ease of work flow. This is really bizaar to me. Can the computer components really effect the sound? I can understand software and programs having these types of impacts, but the hardware running it???? Is this possible, or is something else going on?