I recently installed MC 22.0.30 on my El Capitan Mac Mini which has a Core i7 3.0GHz CPU and 16GB of RAM with a 256GB PCIe based SSD. I was very interested in finding out what music playback would sound like using the new SoX upsampling feature. I had read Miska Developer of HQPlayer say over on CA that "classical music recorded in real acoustics puts demands to the sound field/space, so a linear phase filter is usually good fit, since there are no strong transients or at least very few." MC22's new Sox Linear Phase, VHQ, Steep Filter did remarkable justice to the 16/44.1 classical music that I have ripped from CD when upsampling it to 24/192 and delivering it to the SOtM USB Bridge over a Moon Audio UPOCC Silver USB cable and then on to the Wadia 151 Power DAC via Audio Sensibility UPOCC Silver Digital coax cable where all of the equipment including speakers are supported on Stillpoints Ultra Mini risers.
To me the improvement in playback quality between using the upsampling in MC21 and the SoX upsampling option in MC22 was noticeably better in my audio system with the kind of music I listen to, but that is not the most remarkable difference I found.
The screen grabs below contrast the CPU usage of my Mac Mini while using both MC21 and MC22. I did my best to eliminate the high and low levels and record a median usage for each of them. While each upsampling algorithm was shown to consume relatively the same amount of resources while in NOS mode, MC21 consumes 236% more processing power while upsampling to 192k.
I wanted to share this in hopes of finding out whether this same disparity in CPU usage has been noticed by others migrating from MC21 to MC22?
Maxx
Author
Topic: CPU Usage While Upsampling in MC21 and MC22 with Sox (Read 2413 times)