Which (make) computer sounds best with an external DAC?

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chrisc

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Maybe I am a DAC evangelist, having had 9 DACs in the space of about 5 years.  They do add that extra "nuance" to the music, or to put it another way, extract detail that otherwise might be masked

At a visit to an audio purveyor in the South Peninsula, we met Lukaz of Lampizator fame.  It is his opinion that a music server, running Linux, but with a vastly upgraded power supply, provided the best possible signal to his Lampizator DAC

Not all being willing to spend Mercedes Benz money on a DAC, we asked him for second best.  He suggested a Lenovo laptop, since the USB chipset used in these was, he said, better than that used in other machines.  But of course this will vary as different machines are produced by different factories.

On the Computer Audio Forum, this question seems to have been missed

So far, I have tried (in no particular order of preference) the following make machines and there are variances both in hardware and the operating system

All were running JRiver 22 or 23.  JRiver is set to play music from memory (the whole undecoded files in loaded into memory)

A Dell with an i7 with 16Gb memory running Windows 8.1 was noticeably improved by installing Windows 10
A Lenovo with an i5 and 8gb memory with Windows 10 sounded exactly the same
An ASUS with an i5 and 8gb memory was slightly dull
A MacBook with an i7 and 8gb memory running OS Sierra sounded more crisp and clean
The same Dell as above, running Ubuntu 17.04 was slightly better than the machine with Windows 10

Windows requires a WASAPI or ASIO driver to communicate with the DAC.  Mac and Linux do not.  Is this perhaps an advantage?
 

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