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How important is the USB cable for connecting external HDD/SSD?


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On 5/30/2017 at 1:44 AM, CuteStudio said:

A USB disk cable with either work or give intermittent failures.

 

One properly working cable will pull the data off disk and into memory with exactly the same speed, accuracy and power consumption as any other properly working cable.

 

The disk will be caching and bursting the data into memory buffers etc anyway, but remember the data rate of a computer disk is FAR bigger than audio requires, which is itself a very low bandwidth option.

 

For instance to copy a 30 minute album from a disk - even in uncompressed WAV format will take a few seconds, and on really slow systems perhaps almost a minute. That right there indicates the disk subsystem is at least 30 to 100 times the required speed, so there is plenty of system time to do other stuff.

 

Many audio buffs are unaccustomed to computer hardware and still regard the CD as advanced, whereas in computer terms it has extremely poor error correction, data rate and capacity that's considerably bettered by the cheapest USB stick these days. And about that error correction: if you get the data off a computer disk/stick AT ALL you know it's the correct data, unlike a CD where you hope it's right but you're never quite sure.

 

So as long as it works, a $10 USB cable to your disk is EXACTLY the same as a $1,000,000 USB cable as far as the disk, computer and laws of physics are concerned.

 

Therefore it cannot and will not have any effect on the actual sound, although it may still affect the observed sound.

 

This is because psychological influences affect what we hear and our mood and expectations colour our listening experience, and a nice shiny, expensive USB cable we've just invested in will sound better to the buyer than the old cheap grey cable that's now in the cupboard: despite the fact that the sound coming out of the speakers is exactly the same as before.

 

 

Hi,

 

Just my 2 cents: audio difference between USB cable are not because of errors caused (or not) by USB cable, because these are all good enough to treat data transfert without any errors. The problem is somewhere else : in a computer, you can see all port like a door, and bad cable will introduce noise inside the computer (like an antenna will reflect noise inside a radio). So this has nothing to see with the capability to treat digital signal, but moreover to keep the device isolated from electrical noise. These electrical noise will reflect inside the streamer/computer and will go in the DAC.

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