External hard drives and sound quality

some disk drives are physically noisier than others (fans, etc.). You might be able to hear them if in the listening room. Adding an external drive might add noise to that from the computer itself resulting in more background noise than otherwise. That's the only thing that makes any sense to me regarding the "sound" of disk drives. This has nothing to so with the digital bits or signal source per se.

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.

Larry...with all due respect, that is a very grandiose position. In the bigger picture, I'm fascinated with posts such as yours where people on internet forums decide...based on their knowledge base...that another poster is imagining the basis for his comments. Ones knowledge base must be quite vast to begin assuming such positions! Especially in an audiophile forum where so many things most folks do not understand have such striking impacts. On paper, your comments may be true (although I seriously doubt it) but in practice they are quite false.

The only thing I can add is that with my music server setup which has used both internal and external storage, I cannot attribute any sonic differences to the disk storage media used and I will loose no sleep over this.

Changes to any of the parts of my system that are involved in making or transmitting the analog music signal (Roku network players, DACs, amps, wires, speakers) as opposed to merely storing and sending digital data are all clearly audible to me.

I suspect clearly there must be cases with devices perhaps not functioning correctly or up to specs where sound or even basic operation must be affected, but this is an exception case and not the norm. The solution is to use devices in good working order, not necessarily to change device type in teh quest for better sound.

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.