A nice PC upgrade

I would agree, Al. I think the chipset and the bandwith on
any applicable busses (I don't think Intel uses a frontside
bus any longer) (and USB bus, if one was unfortunate enough to
use it) and implementation of everything else are more
critical, assuming, of course, you do have a CPU fast enough
to handle the maximum tasks at hand effectively, without lag,
to begin with. These small atom boards, I don't believe do,
if they are running a standard windows OS, due to its bloat.
Problem is puters start running more and more processes (and
other things) in the background if not constantly maintained
which tax the CPU, which is why I recommend the biggest you
can afford - and constant cleaning! The larger, faster CPU's
come with the faster (better) chipsets. The motherboard is as
important as the cpu and its relationship (chipset) is
critical.

Hi Cerrot,
You need to try out the new Marantz NA8005 network player from a usb flash drive out to the coax input of your K-03. It may just blow the pc set-up away.
You can see my review of this affordable but excellent product in the Reviews section.
J.

Cerrot, I'm using the Bryston BDP-2. With that unit I have attached 2 2tb external hardrives and 14 usb 32 GB flash drives.
My whole music collection at my finger tips. I control it with my Ipad.

Has anyone noticed any differences in sound quality using an external HD, as opposed to using internal SATA drives?

Zd,

I have not tried it myself, but several people at other fora tried it time ago and it is a sort of an accepted fact they do sound different, with the SATA sounding "better" because it doesn't introduce additional jitter on the USB bus. This is assuming the DAC in use is asynch USB.

USB stands for universal serial bus, so all processes run in series. So when streaming audio data to the DAC and retrieving data from the HDD those processes are in series. Data retrieval has no timing aspect related, but it seems to add some jitter that affects the audio data stream going to the DAC, and sound quality appears to be affected that way. At least this is the way I've come to explain it to myself :-)

I used to run a laptop with a USB drive and asynch USB DAC and it worked fine. Then moved to a CAPS like server which sounds much better, but honestly many things changed from one server to the next and I have been to lazy to try connecting a USB drive to the CAPS and check it out. I should do it, but it's a little cumbersome because my CAPS runs headless.