External hard drives and sound quality

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.

I'm going to agree with Mr Stacy on this one. I'm not saying that they do or don't affect the sound as I haven't tried it myself, but I am saying it is impossible to predict what effect something will have on a system without trying it. If a bunch of people say they have heard a difference then no matter how many logical reasons you have why it won't, it is simply guesswork to conclude that they are wrong.

To the finer point of your position.

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.

I don't think anybody has stated that the data is different. They are saying that using an external drive somehow affects the sound of their system. There are a myriad of ways that hooking up an additional device to a computer would affect its operation. Focusing on one part of the equation (uncorrupted data transfer) ignores a large number of possibilities.

Until you have tried the experiment on numerous, varied systems then trying to prove a negative (HDs do not affect the sound) with logical arguments is a waste of time since you have undoubtedly ignored many variables some of which we may not even know exist.

It has been scientifically proven that bumblebees can't fly which just goes to show that scientific explanations and logical conclusions don't always result in the correct answers.

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Larry_s is correct.

People can believe what they want but there is no technical basis for it.

If you hear something different it is either a placebo effect or something other than the hard disk being external versus internal is responsible for it.

That's about all that I can say with any certainty.

Oh, and also that I am sure that there is someone out there willing to sell someone who believes different disk drive technologies sound different a very nice sounding audiophile grade hard drive for a very reasonable premium as well. Then you can be rest assured that only the best sounding disk drive technology has been introduced into your system.