One of the things I find very fascinating about digital audio is the belief that faster machines make any difference to audio playback, when basically the technology to replay audio is so very light compared to most activities the CPUs are designed for.
As a reference point, a long time ago I used to run Logic Audio on a Mac IIcx, and get 4 channels of audio playback. The Mac IIcx was a 68030 based processor running at 16Mhz, so somewhere around 4 Mips of processing. My machine had 8Mb of RAM and I used a specialist 500Mb SCSI AV drive for audio recording/playback that was specifically detuned so that it produced less throughput, but very consistent latency off disk. I seem to remember something around 1Mb/sec was a good throughput, with the SCSI interface saturating around 1.5Mb/sec. The audio chain included some signal processing, say, some EQ and maybe a very light reverb. This system was commonly used in small studios/home setups, and there are plenty of commercial recording that started life this way.
Around the same time, a state of the art (20k+) audio recording setup would have been based on ProTools. ProTools used multiple motorola 56k processors, running at 100MHz each. So by comparison a ProTools rig would have 4 DSP chips, so around 400Mips of processing power, 100x what I was getting on the native hardware! With suitable audio interfaces and multiple SCSI hard disks, you could record and playback 32 channels of audio whilst also applying EQ and other insert effects on each channel.
Wind forward 25 years, and i'm typing this on a MacBook that has a 4 core i7 processor running at 2.6Ghz. Each core can do an instruction per clock cycle, so call it 10 billion instructions per second for the processor. I think the SSD can pull around 250Mb/sec into memory. I've got 8Gb of ram.
So compared to my Mac IIcx, my current machine has 2,500x the CPU power, 1,000x the memory, and 250x the disk throughput. I was able to get 4 channels of uncompressed audio off the original machine without stuttering or dropouts. Given this perspective, this is why I feel that there aren't many problems to be solved getting quality audio out of a computer ;-)
Cesare
