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External hard drives and sound quality

I've just about filled up the internal hard drive on my Macbook with music files and am now looking at external hard drive options. Was wondering whether folks report any difference in sound quality when playing files from an external drive versus the internal?

I'm especially interested in hearing people's experiences using wireless hard drives. An Apple rep told me it would be no problem, as the hard drive wouldn't directly interface with the USB output, but I of course always like to be skeptical of anything an Apple rep says.
coverto
singleendedsingle
664 posts
 
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.
johnss
591 posts
 
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.
larry_s
128 posts
 
"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?
richard_stacy
686 posts
 
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.
kijanki's avatar
kijanki
4,433 posts
 
Larry_s - I don't understand it either. If data is there the only difference could be jitter and it doesn't apply here since data is synchronous (clocked). In addition it goes thru disk cache buffers and output FIFO buffers. At first I thought it was about audible noise of device itself (HD vs. SSD) - this would make sense.
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