Audiophile systems · £400–£600
A listening PC should be silent. Windows is not, by default.
Fan roar, coil whine, crackle and dropout are engineering problems — thermals, power, interrupts — not a better USB cable. I diagnose the actual source and make the machine quiet enough to live with a DAC.
Reference listening chain: Arya planars into an iFi DSD512 DAC/amp, from a PC I’ve actually tuned. Most “PC audio optimisation” stops at disabling Nahimic. This is the full stack — USB controller to eardrum.
- Acoustic noise — fan curves, pump speed and coil-whine after the thermals actually work
- HQPlayer (desktop and embedded) — filter, modulator, convolution and output for the target DAC and rate
- PGGB / PGGB-RT integration and offline pipeline work
- Stable DSD 512 where the chain actually holds it — not a poster rate
- Correct ASIO buffer size, sample rate, exclusive mode and device routing
- DPC latency investigation (LatencyMon and related tools)
- Power plan, core-parking and interrupt behaviour that affects audio threads
I do not sell snake-oil “audio optimisers”. If the DAC, the room or the modulator can’t hold the rate without jitter, I’ll say so — and we stay at a rate that is actually stable. One bad track is all it takes.