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Best External Hard Drive for music storage.


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In my experience with USB streaming, cables make a difference when there is some electrical ground loop/AC noise being transmitted by the cable. Get rid of those interferences and the cable shouldn't matter as much other than impedance.

Question, has anyone tried to eliminate the 5Vbus and/or ground/shield from the HDD to the computer? Wondering if the ground/shield can be cut after handshake? Or would the ground be necessary for constant back and forth communication with the HDD? What we are trying to do here is eliminate any AC contamination of the Mobo.

 

Why not go with a NAS (Toshiba even makes a 3TB unit for ~$70) that goes into a wireless access point and then you are free of any 5Vbus or grounding issues.

 

For a customer I did this NAS, a D-Link AC router and it was less than $100 all in. This way the electronics can be totally housed elsewhere.

 

My wireless setup gets 50MB/s and for 24/192 it's like not breaking a sweat.

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Wireless would eliminate any contamination from the HDD's, but now you introduced further electrical needs at the mobo to receive that wireless signal and also create further OS operations that in turn can effect SQ. No matter what we do, moving data will create OS operations, guess it's just a question of which create the lest impact to SQ. Is worthy of a test. Might be hard to pinpoint SQ differences, but should be easy to see how much it impacts OS operations.

 

Since both wired and wireless are all buffered and not a zero copy stack. That along with a decent DAC that is going to isolate external noise. I doubt there is going to be a difference detectable once sighted bias is accounted and controlled for.

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As duly noted, Plissken, your in the strict technical aspect of digital applications. But for us, listening observers comes first camp, science has not kept up with the discrepancies observed, in this case heard. So we continue on with this experiment.

 

Science, measurements, math, have made your entire audio world possible.

 

I'm all for discrepancies heard but it needs to be more than the sighted variety.

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And here I thought it was observation first?? Which comes first the chicken or the egg?

 

 

In what regard specifically? If we are talking say TCP/IP the observation was "I need to get this bit of information to a remote host". The rest was math (DUAL, Belleman-Ford, Dijkstra etc).

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Read John Swenson's 3-part interview on Audiostream.

 

I wonder how technical papers will help you: you didn't find anything wrong in Amir's "measurements"...

 

I'm curious how BenchMark was able to run a 100 foot cable for their DAC, with just horrendous amounts of noise and yet it was able to 100% extract pristine audio.

 

Which of Amir's measurements? I hope they aren't any where 3-4 other EE's were able to replicate them in their entirety and form the same conclusions.

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They probably did a great job on isolation. Are you assuming all DACs are built the same?

 

 

 

You have a selective or defective memory - Amir messed up his measurements completely and since you aren't competent in that field, you didn't find fault in them contrary to people who do have proper experience in the relevant fields. Besides, what are your credentials to gauge anything having to do with Engineering? Are you an Engineer yourself?

 

Again. Which of Amir's measurements are you referring to?

 

Which DAC's do you feel will exhibit odd behavior if the computer they are attached to is feeding it via a wireless vs wired connection.

 

I have a feeling if I propose a $99 DAC you will say it's not 'High Resolution' enough. If I propose a $2000 DAC then it will be 'well designed' and therefore not susceptible.

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I'll let you find your own posts about it on this very forum. We had this conversation before on this very subject... The rest is useless speculation and side-tracking.

 

So any idea on what DAC's are going to exhibit 'sonic anomalies' when fed with a computer that is connected wireless vs wired?

 

I seem to remember a conversation where I proved you wrong because you were using a certain persons (JK) post as some form of bizarre support for your howling at the moon.

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Read John Swenson's 3-part interview on Audiostream.

 

So I read the 3 part interview. Where does Swenson provide a point that supports your unsubstantiated claim?

 

** Thanks for pointing out the 3 part article*** What was very interesting is the part 3 comments section where an SGI engineer that has chops writing device driver software takes the article to task for the mis-understanding about software and bit streaming.

 

Cache killers....

Submitted by John Sully on December 30, 2013 - 7:14pm

 

As a former engineer for SGI, I've done a fair amount of cache performance analysis, and have done my fair share of hardware design work and very low level hardware support code. I've also written several hard disk controller drivers, ethernet drivers, serial drivers and some more exotic hardware drivers.

 

The real cache killer is the sequential access to the DMA buffers of your data. You will NEVER get a cache hit on the data your are decoding/transferring, so worrying about cache locality in the executable is worthless. The noise on the computer from code cache misses will be swamped by those from the data buffer misses.

 

There is a lot else wrong with this article on the computer side but a lot of it depends on specific hardware implementations. Bearing in mind that I know very little about the USB protocol, I even have a hard time giving much credence to "packet jitter". Such a problem can be solved with a minimal amount of buffering in the DAC and as long as the system is not bogged down (that's a technical term) interrupt latency should be on the order of microseconds.

 

Read more at http://www.audiostream.com/content/qa-john-swenson-part-3-how-bit-perfect-software-can-affect-sound#WfEQbgl4S5Eht2XS.99

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Gordon's comment is well worth reading. I'll leave it to others to assess whether the characterization of Gordon "taking the interview to task" rings true to them.

 

Gordon also says FLAC sounds better than WAV in that comment. I didn't know you believed in that stuff. ;)

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Computer Audiophile

 

Here is a part of one of his comments:

 

"I sent a email to John Atkinson and Charlie Hansen saying I give up what's making the applications sound different or for that matter file type sound different. To me my research showed that more processing made for worse sound. That is why an ALAC or FLAC file will not sound as good as a flat PCM file like AIFF/WAV does."

 

So he didn't actually say what you think he said.

 

While you have others like JRiver and Foobar creators saying bit streamed audio will sound the same. I personally have never heard one bit stream sound any different than the same bit stream from one application to another. Storage is also cheap so I store all my content in it's native format. I personally have never experienced an audible difference on modern hardware when it comes to the unpackaging of wav out of a flac container.

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Either you can understand John Swenson or you can't.

 

Oh, I understand what he's saying. It's just I don't think he's 100% correct in his assessment. In another thread here he's brought up the variable voltage that Ethernet PHY's can work at. This principal is applied in 'Green' Ethernet switches where they can apply variable voltage to each port based on the length of cable each port drives.

 

He is postulating that these differences could be existent in different cables in various ways depending on that cables properties and therefore possibly, somehow, matriculate to a DAC. Ergo different cables could have a 'signature'.

 

It's something that I discount 99.9% because the driving voltage, using his #, is 50ma max. What ever induced current this places on the Mainboard ground plane is going to get swamped out by so many other, much higher speed and current draw busses.

 

And it's super easy to test.

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Read more carefully.

 

 

How about this. Since computer based systems are buffered. I.E. you can pull the plug and the music will still play.

 

I've got $1000 that says you can't hit 9 out of 10 on a system where I can simply put the wireless adapter into airplane mode. You should be able to tell since you seem to have it all figured out.

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I use a small ssd toshiba q300 pro and a pair of x300 5tb drives

 

I'd say the large drives are audible with the spin so I got a SENDA shock proof holders which have isolated them from the chassis

 

One thing to be aware of is I can hear the difference between flac and wav files, others who hear them cannot hear more sound coming from the sky box than my pc when running

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Computer Audiophile

 

This is the reason I purchased a NETGEAR ReadyNAS. It takes all those issues and moves them out of the room.

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  • 2 months later...
10 hours ago, pam1975 said:

hi, on the same topic, would an external drive like a Transcend ESD400 (it's a portable external SSD drive) work to store my music outside of my NUC?

 

For $200 you could get the Western Digital 4TB Cloud Drive and a Router and move everything way out side of your listening environment. Use wireless to provide physical isolation. All the benefits of Fiber plus you don't have to worry about potential noise of a Fiber to Copper converter that has it's own noisy SMPS as the wireless will be powered by the NUC itself so it's wireless is as clean as the entire computers. 

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14 minutes ago, Nouchka said:

Yes you are correct, wireless is not good for audio... This is time sensitive and wireless is not designed for time sensitive applications 

 

Wireless is great for audio. Mere playback is not time sensitive as it is for real-time monitoring when you are recording a musician. 

 

I shot a video and posted it hear years ago where I started playback, put the wireless adapter in airplane mode, and it played for 15 seconds after downing the adapter. Very timing insensitive as a matter of proof. 

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33 minutes ago, pam1975 said:

so my nuc is connected wirelessly to the WD cloud drive, correct? and the performance of data transmission wouldn't cause potential dropouts? I had not heard of such a set-up before. Interesting.

 

You haven't heard of people using their laptops, tablet, phones, and desktops with a wireless Ethernet adapter?

 

The WD Cloud Drive would be connected to a network switch and the Router becomes and Access Point also connected to the switch.

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