External hard drives and sound quality

"On many systems, you wont hear a difference. On a high res. system, a NAS has a less darker background than a spinning HD, which is not as quiet as a solid state HD."

Sorry, not to be rude, but that's total crap. If you can read/write data to the device without corruption, how can music files retrieved sound different (all other things being equal) depending on the back end storage type?

Kijanki - The only reason why some people claim they a difference using different types of disks is because they know they changed something and had faulty recollection of what they heard previously. It's basically impossible for the disk type (local or NAS) to affect the sound. Even if somehow a few bits got flipped, it wouldn't be in such a way to uniformly change/shape the entire audio bit stream. Disk drives don't use S/PDIF to transfer data. :^) Again this assumes everything after the data read is working correctly.

Richard, you can believe what you want. One doesn't have to know the actual physics or low level mechanisms how disk drives transmit data to the host. If reading disks was so unreliable to the point where data is being modified undetected, then we wouldn't be posting on this forum. Claiming the sound is different depending on the type disk storage is the same thing as saying the type of storage causes the audio stream (data) retrieved to be different. How else can the eventual audio heard be different? We're not talking clocking the stream or retrieving a clock, D/A or anything else. We're talking about moving bits from point A to point B - USB, ethernet, PCI, take your pick. If they're broke, we're not here.

The backing store for music files should have zero impact on sound. All that is required is that the data make it intact to the memory buffer. What happens after that is not part of this discussion.

I'm not debating what the person claimed they heard, just the reasons why they claim what they heard or remembered hearing.

Thanks Herman for pitching in since this thread took off in the last 24 hours.

If somebody does hear a difference in sound by changing disk drives or their connection type, it is not because the data is coming back differently from the disk which would be an obvious reason for change in sound. I think everybody should agree on that. And that was my point.

The contention point, just like so many others in the audio world, is that some people claim they heard a difference. So it's just a matter of did they really hear a difference or just remember incorrectly. Since you can only hear one at a time, the comparison has to made from memory. So far, from what I've done personally and read about, nobody's memory of audio is accurate enough to be trusted as "correct". A large part of the audio world is based on the opposite to be true. No problem. It brings great enjoyment for some and $$$ for many manufacturers.

If you are going to use a PC for a "high quality" digital front end, you really should not be doing D/A in it. Send the PCM stream to an external Firewire or Asynchronous USB based DAC. That way nothing needs a clock till it gets from the memory buffer to the DAC chip inside a "non-noisy" enclosure.

Also, Kijanki brought up a good point about different drives could contain slightly different rips/encodes. That is possible, but I wouldn't think ripping a CD to a .wav file or lossless file would come out so differently that it would produce audible differences. But for "testing" the same source audio file should be copied to the various disk devices to rule out any issues.

And for a little OT, if any of you are Beatles fans and have not seen/heard Cheap Trick perform Sgt. Peppers, make sure you get the DVD or CD. It's awesome!

Doesn't seem like you've read any of the previous posts.