External hard drives and sound quality

Granite Digital offers firewire cables that include a number of special design provisions that are claimed to make possible lengths up to 32 feet. They offer 1394A and 1394B cables in that length for $90 to $100. I have no experience with them, although I've used some of their other products (with good results). Datasheet pdf's are linked to here.

Also, firewire hubs and repeaters are widely available, which can also be used to extend firewire connection lengths.

Best regards,
-- Al

Alright. This kind of applies here. I have a Sonos player and I stream my NAS drive through it. Just about 30 minutes ago I upgraded the coax cable to the modem and replaced every ethernet cable in the chain to CAT6 patch cables of 8 feet each. The sound improvment was insane. I just wanted to be able to get all the info through with ease. I wasn't expecting an audible difference. Now I have some serious bass response. And everything seems just... more fluid... like it isnt even trying anymore. It ranks with one of my best upgrades so far. $21 worth of patch cables and a $12 quad-shielded coax. Awesome. Wonder if a gigabit router would make a difference. ????

Hi
I have a P4 based system with Windows XP SP3 OS and use cics memory player ( CMP2 ) for highest quality music playback.

I use EAC to rip CDs to hard disk and have a 40G SATA connected internal drive and have just added a Western Elements 1 Tb external drive that is powered via AC and connected via USB.

I started ripping to new drive and played back a few albums and thought somethings a miss here, a bit harsher sounding, less real and involving....

so re-ripped a track to each drive for an exact test comparison...'Bennie and the Jets' as I was ripping Elton John's 'Goodbye Yellow Brick Road'.

In CMP2, track is loaded from hard disk to RAM and all playback is from 'RAM', even so the differences are clear, my internal Seagate drive sounds..more more information, more presense, and more emotionally involving, rythmic and listenable, engaging...

by comparison the external drive was as aforementioned previously above......so differences could be cable related, usb as opposed to sata this being compounded as remember music is first copied then resent from the hard drive back along the cable for another journey before playback, or power supply, or internal electronic makeup of the drives, and/or any combination of these factors...

so in my system, which also includes a NAD304 Amplifier, DAC
is SB Audigy 24bit internal sound card, Cardas interlink up to amplifier and some custom 3 way in-wall speakers, there are sound quality differences.

:) Stephen

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

I have another question concerning external hard drives and sound quality. What if I was using a USB DAC without external power? Will a hard drive on another USB port affect the voltage given to my DAC which in turn can degrade sound quality?