umea101

Just to correct your physics. The 6db drop in SPL comes from distributing the wave energy over a four times bigger area when doubling the distance, not from absorption. This means the sound energy is still there, and not converted to heat.

What you perceive as detail might be just be worse sound. What I found out during my hifi "career" is that improving something in the system (cables, electrical components, better clocks ...) makes sound more coherent, i.e. sounds appear as a whole not as a sum of different unrelated sounds, which might be perceived as detail. Especially with digital, more relaxed sound always equates to better sound for me.

My Leopard System stops playing music when I kill coraudiod and only resumes once coreaudiod is (automatically) restarted with a new PID.

Hi! I can imagine that things become slower once you assigned priority to the audio programs, although I did not notice any difference on a dual core iMac. Anyway this should be gone on reboot. As you have noticed new PIDs are assigned and the previous nice value forgotten. Seems like the problem is elsewhere. I would check the activity monitor what is eating the processor time.

Hi lovejoy, Thanks for your comment, I am hearing the same things you are hearing. The thing that was bugging me was that I was getting varying degree of performance from itunes, sometimes it would improve on a restart. If I give the process high priority the results are better and more consistent. As for the PID of coreaudio you can try opening a terminal window and doing a "ps -Al" This should give you a list of all running processes with their PID and also their nice value. Hope that helps Joachim

But there should be a way to tell the system on startup to start coreaudio with a lower nice value. Any geeks out there?

whether it makes a difference or not. In some ways the changes I notice are rather subtle, but if I listen for a longer time music seems to be more relaxed, fatigue free.

I am curious about what you hear. I am running a previous generation 24" iMac into an Audio Note DAC Kit 2.1B Signature using the HagUSB input with a Tentlabs Clock via a Locus Design Polestar. Amplifier is an Audio Note Kit One, speakers Audio Note AN-K/SPa. All other wiring Audio Note.

Can anyone try the following experiment: -) Listen to a track played via iTunes. -) open a terminal window -) start "top" -) find the pid of coreaudio and itunes -) remember PID_ITUNES and PID_COREAUDIO -) quit "top" -) renice them via sudo renice -20 -p PID_ITUNES sudo renice -20 -p PID_COREAUDIO -) listen again -) report differences I am curious about your observations.