Any professional/semi-professional audio interface made in the past 15 years or so (including your Presonus) will itself be capable of very high audio quality, and I doubt you would hear a significant difference solely by changing your audio interface. The main reasons to upgrade it would be if it was no longer compatible with current computer platforms (operating systems, hardware, drivers, etc.), or if you wanted more audio output channels for driving additional speakers.
CPUs don't *directly* affect sound quality -- only indirectly in terms of whether they have sufficient processing power to handle the sample sets you want to use with the audio/realism quality options in Hauptwerk that you want to use with them. Hauptwerk v6 has settings that allow you to get noticeably better audio quality/realism, but they need more processing power:
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=19209&start=60#p146005
mdyde wrote:Antoni Scott wrote:Will my sound be improved to the fullest extent that Version VI provides even if I am using a vintage computer (in my case the MacPro 12 core from 2010 or 2011, not sure which one) ? I'm concerned that my computer's internal workings or my external sound card may not be compatible with the latest audio software improvements in Version VI.
If your computer is compatible with v5 then it will also be compatible with v6 -- there are no changes in platform prerequisites between the two versions, so if your computer can run v5 then it can run v6, as I covered in more detail in your previous topics:
viewtopic.php?f=4&t=19390
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=19185&start=45#p145935
If you want to use Hauptwerk v6's 96 kHz audio output option then your audio interface will need to support 96 kHz. Any professional/semi-professional audio interface made in the past 15 or so years will almost certainly be capable of 96 kHz audio output, but you could check your interface's specifications or documentation to verify that if needed.
The two new higher-quality audio options are more CPU-intensive. Any v5/v6-compatible computer will be able to use them, but if you enable both of the higher-quality options (for maximum audio quality) then you will need to reduce you polyphony limit setting to about 25% of the value that you would use in v5 (or in v6 if you don't have the two higher-quality audio options turned on). Thus you would be able to play considerably less pipes at once. That probably isn't too much of a limitation with a 12-core computer, but it's something to be aware of.
However, bear in mind that the two new higher-quality audio options are indeed options -- you don't have to turn either or both of them on, and one of them ('higher-definition pitch-shifting') is a per-organ option, so you could turn it on for organs that your computer can manage easily, and turn it off for very large organs if you found that those organs struggled with it on your computer.
Also, Piotr's Alessandria sample set is itself exceptionally CPU-intensive (since it is very large and has many virtual pipes per real pipe), so if you want a sample set of that size to perform properly, and sound its best (by enabling Hauptwerk v6's high audio quality/realism options) then you would need a very powerful computer indeed. I don't know off-hand whether Piotr's Nancy sample set is quite as large or CPU-intensive as his Alessandria, but it's still very large.
A 2011-vintage 12-core 3.3 GHz Mac Pro is still a very powerful computer even today, but it's 10 years old (which is a long time in computer technology terms), and current similarly-high-spec. computers will out-perform it by a substantial margin. (As far as I know, 2011 Mac Pro CPUs didn't support AVX CPU instruction sets, which make a big difference to performance for Hauptwerk v5+, for example.) Whether it would be enough to handle Piotr's Nancy sample set properly with Hauptwerk v6's highest-quality/realism options enabled, I don't know.