Selecting the boot device is not my problem. Getting the BIOS settings to change for each different boot device is my problem. For example, I want hyperthreading to be turned on for my non-audio OS, but I want it turned off for the audio OS. There are many such settings to tweak in the audio OS, so I don’t want to have to go through all the settings every time I boot the audio OS. I don’t know that ANY BIOS/UEFI, even modern ones, pull that trick. Google suggests that they don’t, insofar as my searches have turned up nothing like that.
Kinda weird, if you ask me. Dual boot has been around for a long time. Seems antiquated to, at best, have to go into BIOS each time to select a saved profile.
The interesting thing about Euphony is it has provisions to turn off hyperthreading, slow down processors, and many other things. If you like to tweak, they seem to know how to take care of you.
Yeah, I was reading about it, and the CPU core control stuff was really interesting. However, for that asking price, I should stay on target towards the amp upgrade. I’m happy with Audiolinux for now.
I hope your journey through cables is productive. I find that making your own cables is very rewarding and relatively easy. For my current speaker cables, I tried to backward engineer the Auditorium 23 cables. In my system, they sound much better than the Kimber 8TC, and it only cost me about $200 to make a 20-foot pair. I want to experiment building shielded interconnects and power cables.
Long-term listening soured me on feeding the USB input from the NUC. There was a slight hardness/glare to the sound that was fatiguing. I’ve gone back to the Bridge II, and I’m much happier. I’ve lost a tiny bit of detail or specificity, but it’s a more pleasant listening experience.
I’m sure there are many things I could do to make the USB feed better in every way, but I doubt that the cost of those “bandaids” would compare well with something like the dCS Network Bridge, especially once you start adding linear power supplies to all those “bandaids.”