Play Nice Together
The faster you try to make a computer, the greater
potential there is for detrimental side-effects such as audio-stream
bottlenecking and heat. By looking at a system from the standpoint of
balance, we can prevent these problems and eliminate
audio dropouts. How efficiently the components speak to each other
becomes much more significant than how fast an individual component is.
Over-clocking, high-speed busses, high-speed chipsets, and front-side
buss speeds are often touted as "must-have" specs when it's really the
sum of these specs that makes a system perform well. Speed is not the
name of the game - it's throughput. It's not how fast your data travels
in one part of the system, it's how much data gets through the whole
system in a certain amount of time.
Holistic Design
All the different component speeds in Rain Recording systems are matched or over-specified to eliminate bottlenecks and enhance performance with less resource utilization, less heat, and consequently less fan noise. That's why a system that has "paper specs" above a Rain system will often use much higher CPU resources in a given audio software application. If not bridled by component balancing, software applications can unnecessarily eat up CPU resources. One of our greatest challenges at Rain Recording is in redefining and demystifying performance in the face of some age-old precepts that the muscle is in the component specifications - it's not, it's in the whole design.