External hard drives and sound quality

Once people encounter something counter-intuitive like digital cable affecting the sound they tend to stretch this to every possible case. Different sound of NAS drives could be related to something else then drive itself - for instance music was ripped two times to drive and is not identical - even if this is the same song/piece, or system was just turned on while second drive was tested later when system was warm and tweeters (ferrofluid) warmed-up. In addition to this we have placebo effect. In coducted tests people often swear to hear big difference while in reality they listen to exactly same set-up.

I remember joke about Russian scientist that was removing flea legs one by one ordering it everytime to jump. When he removed last one and flea did not follow his order he wrote a note "Removing all legs makes flea deaf"
One has to be very careful with conclusions.

Kijanki, I agree with your last post but there are some things in the second to last that I take exception to. Nobody has even hinted that the drives are corrupting the data. Both you and Mapman use that as some sort of proof that the drives can't alter the sound when nobody has suggested that is the reason. It is like Mr Stacy said, I said, and even you alluded to in your last post; there are things that can affect the sound that we don't understand. Stating all hard drives sound the same because they all deliver the same bits ignores all else. OK, I said that before and yet I still get bits is bits tossed at me so evidently I'm not getting my point across.

BTW I don't use any feedback in my amps and think they sound wonderful.

So Russian fleas respond to a verbal commands? I would like to see that :>)

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All of a sudden in the last week the sound in my headset has gone to hell. Used to be absolutely great! Now, a lot of clipping or static around the edges of the music. Could my External HD be acting up or could it be the Toslink "Out" from the Mac Pro? Maybe the answer is here in this thread. I use iTunes which has always served me well.

So when my investment house calculates the interest on my portfolio, all other things being equal, does one computer drive give a different number than another? Or is this unknown, not understood phenomena involving different hard drives only discernible by audiophiles with highly resolving systems?

Herman - Russian fleas are very special.
I would go back to my example with Benchmark DAC1. Even if jitter rejection of this DAC would be perfect people would still claim that it is not, because different drives sound different (read info from CD differently). I don't have any problem with that as long as people don't make conclusion that Benchmark is jitter sensitive.

In your case when exactly same data lands inside of processor memory it has to be outputted same way. Sound might be different - I don't question your hearing but not because of the fact that data delivered to DAC is different.

So many other things might affect test. We often forget about noise created by dimmer switches or the fact that radio stations have to cut power in half around 6PM (FCC regulation) or about warm-up of the gear.

The only thing I know for sure is that data delivered to D/A converter will be exactly same with different drives if they use exactly same file. Other than that I agree that they might sound different for the reason of electrical noise or ground loops (or something else) that affect analog section of the system.