[treetrouble]

Total hypothesizing and speculation here but...

I work with audio and music software (in which timing accuracy is a major component). Timing accuracy 20 years ago was generally far, far better than a modern PC. The Atari ST is still the gold standard -- with regard to timing it makes Ableton Live 8 running on OSX look/sound like garbage. Without multitasking, whatever program you were using could prioritize timing over the GUI and other components in a way that a modern name brand OS won't allow

Again, pure speculation here but this may be the case at least to some degree for Win 3.1 because there aren't as many network services and other bells and whistles running in the background. It may even be the case that Win 3.1 doesn't have real multitasking. Maybe someone can chime in on that

[dvhh]

Indeed windows 3.1 provide cooperative multi-tasking instead of our modern preemptive multitasking.

Cooperative : it is up to the current thread/process to give up its CPU usage, meaning that if a thread is stalled the whole system is considered crashed (except for interrupt, which allowed for windows to recover via magic keys ).

Preemptive : The system govern the use of the CPU and arbitrary take CPU usage from the thread/process.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_multitasking#Cooper...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preemption_%28computing%29

[baddox]

That's interesting. I've also done a lot of music production (just amateur stuff, as a hobby) with software like Reason, Ableton Live, and Cubase, and I've never noticed any shortcomings regarding timing accuracy. Latency is always an issue, so a good audio interface if imperative, but that's the only performance issues I've encountered. What exactly are the shortcomings of modern systems regarding timing accuracy?

[treetrouble]

It's not something that's easily perceptible unto itself unless you get into very radical inconsistencies. As an example using arbitrary numbers, a quarter note would be 500 ticks one time and 493 ticks the next and so on...

It can be measured by recording the audio on a (timing accurate!) dedicated system and analyzing the waveform

Subtle as it may be, timing accuracy has an essential impact on how we perceive music as a whole. This is one contributor among a few as to why vintage drum machines and sequencers have become so sought after as software-baed music production has become more prevalent. The Akai MPC series (at least the 2000XL and previous) models have been found to have the most consistent timing of any machine with the Atari ST being the strongest computer sequencer.

Sorry, I don't have time to cite this stuff (breaking my own rule) but it should be easy to google

As an aside, poor timing accuracy can be a reason why in pulse-based music that some human musicians "just suck" even if they're otherwise proficient. Or some musicians are "just have it" even though they're playing something unremarkable