External hard drives and sound quality

Hello all. Would like to offer a tweak that everyone above will find beneficial. Every piece of gear mentioned above suffers from internal vibration plus digital jitter which lowers the fidelity of your system. Putting your drives (internal or external)and receivers on 3 brass footers supported on a wood plinth (preferably maple) and rubber/cork supports under that will provide significant gain in the quality of the sound produced. Mapleshaderecords dot com can provide pictures of the above solution. I use isoblocks (rubber/cork) to support my Logitech Duet Receiver and home made wood blocks (2 pieces of 1"x1"x8" with 2 deck screws through each) under my PC to penetrate the carpet and drain the vibration from the hard drive. This solution is very cheap and produced positive results for my system. Happy Listening.

It depends mainly on the software you are using for playback, using external hd's with a good music playing software is very effective and i dont hear differences between.

Really depends on the resolution ability of your system the audio signal is going through.

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.

"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?

I have to agree with Johnss, in general. To me, there is a most certainly a difference in sound from different types of drives. Why this is, I do not know. What I am learning about computer audio is that so many things matter that we figured should not and I imagine this will continue to get more complicated as new digital sources mature. Personally, I decided not to get into trying to choose a drive based on sound and went with convenience and simplicity. The differences are subtle enough that it was not worth the effort.