External hard drives and sound quality

Why do you assume I would not use them? I have 3 external drives hooked up to my computer. I have no idea whether or not they can affect the sound and neither do you because neither one of us or that other fellow have done the testing to prove it one way or another. I use software that loads a file into memory before it plays it which I like to believe mitigates any negative effects reading from any drive might have. It seems perfectly logical but I have no proof of that. For me to state external drives do affect the sound would be just as silly as you stating they don't because neither of us has any proof.

I'm having a hard time believing you are an engineer. If you are then you must have been trained in the scientific method yet you completely ignore the basic premises. You have a hypothesis that you now believe to be a scientific law with very limited testing. Going back to a previous post, using your logic you must believe that bumblebees can't fly. There is no scientific reason they can so therefore they can't. That is exactly the same logic as "People can believe what they want but there is no technical basis for it."

As for wireless I got my sister a 1TB Buffalo NAS drive that hooks to her wireless router via ethernet that works fine. She uses iTunes on a PC to stream from that wirelessly to an Aiport Express hooked into her stereo. No claims whether or not any of that affects the sound as I've done no comparisons but it sounds fine to me and she has no dropouts. The transfer rate is a bit slow but fine for audio. It also has a USB port so you can use that to hook up direct to the PC to speed things up when you load it.

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Herman,

I have some evidence to support my "hypothesis".

I have used internal, external USB, and wireless NAS storage and I have heard no differences. Nor do I hear a difference having used three different computers as music servers.

I do hear differences whenever I change any other part of my system.

So my data points support my hypothesis even though scientifically it proves nothing as you say.

Also, none of this surprises me based on my understanding of how computer and audio systems work. So I am as comfortable as I can be in my "beliefs".

You are the one bringing "scientific law" into the discussion not me.

I also would state that I do believe bumblebees can fly, so your model for predicting my beliefs is apparently not working very well.

Hopefully my limited experience in the area of question can be of benefit to someone.

So what practical advice or opinion is it that you are offering those interested in the question again besides the wisdom of realizing that nothing proves anything?

Mapman wrote: "I have used internal, external USB, and wireless NAS storage and I have heard no differences. Nor do I hear a difference having used three different computers as music servers."

Mapman - you're not going to win this argument because "somebody else might hear it". To me this is utterly nonsense that is anti-scientific and brings voodoo-harm to this forum. If we really don't know anything and have to test everything than perhaps we should test if red car has better gas millage than blue car before buying - because: "would be just as silly as you stating they don't because neither of us has any proof".

If we would pay attention to every possibility we would not have computers today.

Kijanki, I reread your post a few times and I'm not sure which side you are on, if either.

Mapman, you finally bring something to the table.

"I have used internal, external USB, and wireless NAS storage and I have heard no differences. Nor do I hear a difference having used three different computers as music servers."

Sorry if I missed it but it looked to me like everything you posted before was telling us why it shouldn't make any difference, not that you have tried it and found none. I have no problem with somebody taking a position based on their own experience even though I'm not sure your limited tests are in any way conclusive other than for you. What bothers me are those making dogmatic statements based on what they believe should be true based on "technical" matters or what they've heard from others. That's what gets us statements like:

All well designed and built amps sound the same. All wires sound the same. Transistors have lower distortion so they must sound better than tubes. Horns honk. Negative feedback lowers distortion so it must be good. All digital is the same because bits are bits. Computers have too much non-audio stuff in them to be any good for audio. And on and on and on.

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Herman - The key is to make some sorting. Most of items you mentioned are in analog domain where things are getting extremely complicated but "bits are bits" is relatively easy to explain. Data stored on HD is retrieved without error - (not even single bit) or computers would not work. Data is extracted first to HD cache buffers and then to computer memory to end-up in FIFO output buffers. Data leaves FIFO buffer bit by bit exactly same (no matter what drive it came from). Digital data can only sound different if jitter is involved (noise in time domain). It doesn't apply here since transmission between HD and computer is synchronous (clocked). Computer has to present on its output exactly same information from the same file on different HD otherwise networks would not operate properly.

Asynchronous S/Pdif data coming from CDP could be an example of place where bit are not just a bits because of jitter.

It is remotely possible that you might hear different sound from different HD because of ground loops created by disk that affects analog audio - but it has nothing to do with type of HD. That would be pretty good example of case where experiment is useless (brings false conclusion).

People claim that jitter rejecting Benchmark DAC1 is still sensitive to transports therefore not exactly jitter rejecting. Strange part is that cheap DVD players often sound better with DAC1 (according to their testimony) than expensive transports. How is it possible? Again - wrong conclusion. Jitter rejection of Benchmark DAC1 has nothing to do with it and it is simply ability of given player to retrieve data from CD (DVD players have good tracking). It could be issue of ground loops as well.

Negative feedback that you mentioned indeed lowers distortion and sounds better but only if is used intelligently. Good designer would design amp as linear as possible to get below about 5% THD and then apply negative feedback to knock down THD to about 0.5%. Now it becomes necessary to lower input bandwidth to one that amp had before feedback was applied (to prevent TIM distortions) and voila - we got great sounding amp that nobody will buy because it has limited bandwidth and 0.5% of THD.