Will higher specs/newer notebook produce better sound quality?

[Lummy Keen]

Dear all,

Goodday.

I use Cakewalk on a 10 years old Dell inspiron notebook, with windows7 64 bit.

Does using an old notebook produce worse sound than a higher specs/newer notebook? eg better notebook will produce better sound quality? assuming all else equal.

Thank you.

[Nigel Mackay]

Does your current setup struggle with anything?

[RobertWS]

A better notebook will do things faster.  It won't make anything sound better.  All else being equal.

 

[Sonarman]

Yes, If you are using internal soundcard. How good does your old notebook perform? If you are using internal soundcard make sure not to use Fast Bounce while exporting. Some systems produce bad quality Bounce if the CPU is peaking or the MB is heated up. But this totally depends on how good your old notebook is. You can install a cup meter gadget to always keep an eye on the cpu. Also the latency will improve with better specs

Edited July 28, 2020 by Sonarman

[slartabartfast]

The quality of the "sound" within  Cakewalk is not affected by the machinery that is processing it once it gets past the analog/digital stage--typically your audio interface. It is digital data, and no computer on the market today will produce significant errors in how the digital data is calculated or moved around. The digital files that you export or burn to CD from Cakewalk will have the same quality no matter what type of audio interface, sound card etc. Again they are data not "sound" at all. A newer /faster computer may perform calculations faster, but there is no reason to believe it will get more accurate results.

The real sound that you hear when the data is passed through the digital to analog converter in a playback device, or the digital data that is captured in the analog to digital stage of the audio interface may be colored by the device, but not by the computer. Played on a better audio playback device the digital data  (wav file) will sound better, but once digitally recorded the signal can not have any better quality than it had at the initial analog to digital conversion, although you can make it sound better by filtering out noise etc. So if you are looking for capturing quality, the investment has to be in the analog signal chain (microphones, preamps, outboard mixers etc.), and in a reasonably good audio interface. Most are quite good enough, including the onboard sound chips of most contemporary machines. If you are interested in exporting quality all that stuff is irrelevant. If you are interested in hearing quality, then the investment is in high quality playback devices, speakers, amps  etc. that you plan to listen to it on.

Edited July 28, 2020 by slartabartfast

[Promidi]

No.