External hard drives and sound quality

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.

Kijanki, I think we are in agreement on this. When we get out of the realm of low to mid fi systems where it is very easy for most of us to hear a difference and for the most part we can agree on which sounds better; we get into the upper end systems where it starts to become a matter of preference rather than right or wrong and a lot of what may be a subtle or even inconsequential difference to one might be a deal breaker for another. One who is a big fan of vocal music and focuses on midrange purity may be oblivious to abnormalities in the bass region that a fan of rock and roll would find horrendous.

Onhwy61, if you had followed the thread you would know that nobody here is arguing that the data is corrupted, only that there may be some other mechanism in play that affects the sound of the system. Having a computer add 2 and 2 to get 4 when it doesn't really matter how long it takes to come up with the answer within reason is much different than processing data in real time to produce audio.

Puerto, play some files from your internal drive to see whether or not it is the external. You can get a cheap toslink for a few bucks that will tell you if the fiber is defective. Try your headphones and DAC and whatever else with a different computer. Continue in that vein until you isolate the problem.

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Thanks Herman for pitching in since this thread took off in the last 24 hours.

If somebody does hear a difference in sound by changing disk drives or their connection type, it is not because the data is coming back differently from the disk which would be an obvious reason for change in sound. I think everybody should agree on that. And that was my point.

The contention point, just like so many others in the audio world, is that some people claim they heard a difference. So it's just a matter of did they really hear a difference or just remember incorrectly. Since you can only hear one at a time, the comparison has to made from memory. So far, from what I've done personally and read about, nobody's memory of audio is accurate enough to be trusted as "correct". A large part of the audio world is based on the opposite to be true. No problem. It brings great enjoyment for some and $$$ for many manufacturers.

If you are going to use a PC for a "high quality" digital front end, you really should not be doing D/A in it. Send the PCM stream to an external Firewire or Asynchronous USB based DAC. That way nothing needs a clock till it gets from the memory buffer to the DAC chip inside a "non-noisy" enclosure.

Also, Kijanki brought up a good point about different drives could contain slightly different rips/encodes. That is possible, but I wouldn't think ripping a CD to a .wav file or lossless file would come out so differently that it would produce audible differences. But for "testing" the same source audio file should be copied to the various disk devices to rule out any issues.

And for a little OT, if any of you are Beatles fans and have not seen/heard Cheap Trick perform Sgt. Peppers, make sure you get the DVD or CD. It's awesome!