Sonic advantages of feeding music player from eSATA serial connection? (vs USB port)

[PorkChop]

This is a break-off question from an Oppo thread because it would relate to any machine that renders audio files from external HDs.

 

On the web there are several comparisons of the two interfaces when used for file transfer, but I cannot find any analysis regarding pros/cons when used as audio sources. I saw a few threads on CA that generally imply eSATA serial ATA is "better", but can anyone shed more light to help me know what to look and listen for? Does the stream through eSATA serial bring less jitter than USB, or does the port not matter as much in this application as it does with, say, DAC connections?

 

[scraps@midnight]

This is a very interesting question to me. I had an experience on Saturday that relates...maybe. I was using a NAS (Seagate Blackarmor) connected to my router via ethernet cable which streamed to my laptop and Logitech Transporter (digital out to dac). My NAS drive failed Saturday and it so happened that I had just received a OWC Mercury Pro Elite case and bare drive in preperation for changes in configuration when my BAD USB converter arrived. Luckily, I had copied the NAS onto the OWC just the day prior! In a mad scramble to get music playing after the NAS drive failed, I connected the OWC case to my laptop via eSATA (VAIO w/SSD), rerouted Squeezebox Server to get to my music and I had a stunning experience. Improvement in every area. Much more transparent, vivid, airy, detailed, dynamic. I was shocked and have no explanation at all. It could be several things so it may not be just the change to eSATA. My NAS was full and now I know it was also failing. I was streaming before and the drive is now hardwired. The Seagate uses cheap components and the OWC has very good components...I have no clue. I do know my system very very well and this was not a subtle change. I am very happy/lucky this happened because I would have attributed it to the new BAD converter (when it arrives) and praised it's ability for something that was totally unrelated.

 

Not sonic at all but very convenient result was scan speed. A scan for new music (aprox 1TB, 30,000 songs) in Squeezebox Server took roughly 35 minutes before and with this arrangement it took 40 seconds. That is a massive change!

 

[AudioDoctor]

and I have to admit, the music sounds better than it did when on a firewire drive. Do not ask me to describe the sound in audiophile terms, but it did in fact sound "better"

 

[ted_b]

You said your NAS was "streaming". That means your SB-server was installed on your NAS and the NAS was streaming via TCP/IP. Did you then move your SB-server app to the laptop? Aren't you still streaming (i.e that's all a Transporter sees when running Squeebox is streaming TCP/IP packets)?

 

Or...by streaming did you mean that the NAS was connected to the laptop via gigabit ethernet and being your external drive for your laptop (not streaming at all, just external drive), and that now you instead have an OWC drive...and the SB-server never moved (laptop-based all along).

 

In the first example too many things changed to blame the NAS; in the second example the NAS is likely the culprit for poor sound, and the OWC for the improvement.

 

[scraps@midnight]

Yea, I may have tried to runoff to much info in one post. Let me try again...

 

Music was on the NAS hard wired via ethernet to my router. All else was wireless. SBS ran on my laptop and the Transporter was not hardwired either. The only change that occurred was rather than the NAS, now dead, being hardwired to the router, now the OWC is connected to my laptop via eSATA. Make sense?

 

[Jud]

Make sense?

 

In terms of the changes you made, yes. In terms of what this has to do with USB, no.

 

[scraps@midnight]

Huh?

 

[ted_b]

connect a hard drive than, say, USB. Does it even have sonic consequences? Scraps story is quite relevant I would say (once I asked a few questions). It tells the story of moving from NAS to eSata and finding sonic benefits.

 

By the way, many many folks swear that eSATA is the best connection for music hard drives, both speed (somewhat irrelevant for memory playback players, frankly) and sound (go figure).. I moved from firewire direct connect (Oyen Digital) to gigabit ethernet NAS (Synology DS410) and haven't really been able to do a good a/b. I will tonight or tmrw though (I have an idea how I can do this via PM/iTunes and not screw things up too bad). The theory is that gigabit ethernet is acoustically and electronically isolated, and that it is faster than USB or FW, but not quite as fast as SATA/eSata.

 

[Audio_ELF]

The OP asked... " Does the stream through eSATA serial bring less jitter than USB, or does the port not matter as much in this application as it does with, say, DAC connections?"

 

There is no jitter in the transfer of data from a disk to the computer for playback; however different connection methods will cause the processor to be used in different was and different processors are involved. This *may* result in difference SQ.

 

Eloise

 

[Jud]

Lots of factors to consider here.

 

Speed - As you alluded to, ted_b, with memory players speed would be relevant only regarding how quickly a file would load before playback started.

 

Sound -

 

- For reliability of transfer, wireless doesn't quite match wired. It's also difficult to be absolutely sure nothing else will try to use the ethernet connection while you're playing music. There are few things so irritating as being swept up by a piece of music only to have a momentary dropout bring you plonking back to earth. For that reason alone I'd personally prefer a wired connection.

 

- CPU usage: USB>eSata>Firewire, meaning sound quality to the extent dependent on CPU usage would tend to be the opposite (FW best, USB worst). Integer mode plus async USB interface would tend to reduce synchronous CPU usage and its effects on jitter and electrical interference. Integer mode and async transfer are also possible with Firewire. I've never heard of integer mode in conjunction with eSata.

 

- Jitter: Integer/async with either USB or Firewire can minimize jitter. The jitter figures I've seen for eSata are tremendously variable, making me think they are heavily dependent on hardware and implementation. I don't know whether this interface is capable of the low jitter numbers of integer/async mode on the other two interfaces.

 

[ted_b]

The OP simply wants to know if eSata hard drive connections are better than USB, and the example Scraps used is where he changed from NAS to eSata and loved it. Wireless, and integer mode USB DACs, seem irrelevant to this discussion. Not sure where you are coming from.

 

As Eloise said, jitter is not a hard drive issue.

 

[AudioDoctor]

every single one of them is "jitter"

 

 

 

[Jud]

Sheesh, maybe I cut in front of an elderly lady in the lunch line without realizing it? Must be my day....

 

Yep, several (not quite "every single one") of my answers were about jitter. As I note below, I managed to bring some confusing information about DACs to this discussion of hard drives. Eloise or ted_b, would appreciate learning why jitter isn't a hard drive issue. (I'm really interested in knowing, this isn't some sort of challenge on my part.)

 

Wireless - Saw NAS (Network attached storage) being discussed, figured that should be wired or wireless ethernet, depending on your individual rig (though yes, I understand the OP's rig was hard wired). So I mentioned wireless, and my reason for not wanting to use it.

 

USB and Firewire integer and async - Yeah, must just have been "stem" (reflex, getting only as far as the brain stem and not making it to the cognitive centers). Sorry for the confusion. Comparison of CPU utilization among interfaces might still be useful re sound quality. I included Firewire in case the OP wanted to consider it, even though he hadn't asked about it specifically.

 

Hope this helps. :-)

 

[ted_b]

It describes the deviation in arrival time from a reference clock, and is measurable using a digital musical signal path. Moving data from a hard drive to the computer is not a musical function.

 

[Jud]

This is probably the core of my failure to understand: I wonder if jitter in the process of putting the data on the hard drive can show up at the DAC and affect the music.

 

Is the data effectively unclocked at the point at which it's stored on the hard drive?

 

I don't understand what would distinguish this from optical storage on a CD, DVD, SACD, etc., and I would think jitter in the process of recording the data and storing it optically will show up in the music unless the data is pulled in accordance with another clock at some point (e.g., at the DAC if the DAC has an async USB input).

 

[ted_b]

I thought, when I went to the NAS a few months ago, that the sonics improved slightly, especially noise floor and cleaner high end. But I never had a chance to go back and really a/b with my Oyen digital fw drive.

 

Today I set up a second iteration of iTunes (hold option on startup and direct it to a different iTunes library file/folder) then pointed it to the Oyen drive, which is a perfect duplicate of my partition on the NAS for this experiment. Voila.

 

I had my son do the iTunes start randomly and then start PM inter mode. In every case I was able to identify the Oyen drive...it just sounded slightly more brittle, like this Lund of equipment breaking in.....less accurate timbre, and a slight raise of the noise floor. I'm convinced that the NAS is th right choice for me, is acoustically and electrically isolated, and is fast (full gigabit path from NAS tom router to MAC Mini).

 

[Hypnotoad]

 

Has anyone had the opposite experience as Ted? Has anyone found Firewire to be better than a raid system?

 

I am trying to figure out what would be the cheapest high-quality 1 TB hard drive with an Ethernet connection. I'd also be interested in comparing it to a 2 TB ethernet raid system.

 

[firedog]

Jud-

 

Data transfer in a network or a PC doesn't have jitter - it is only a data transfer, and packet protocols etc, ensure it is perfect. There's no clocking involved. This is true if you copy data from a CD. That's how we know we can get "bit-perfect" rips. So essentially, you should be able to get perfect rips of CD/DVD data to an HD. There is no clocking data there.

 

If this wasn't true, you couldn't be sure that any file you save (of any type) would be identical to its source. Of course, the CD/DVD itself can have "errors" (often due to dirt or scratches) that can result in transfer with "errors". But in this case the data is also being copied as it is written (i.e. with errors), at least as far as the equipment involved can read and write it.

 

PLAYING a CD is an audio process, and clocks and jitter are part of the process.

 

Clocking only enters the picture when the data stream is processed for/converted to an audio stream. That's why SPDIF and other methods of tranferring AUDIO signals (audio file data stream + clock data) have jitter issues, and data transfer over a network or to or from a HD doesn't.

 

 

 

 

[Elysian]

I'm chiming in to vehemently agree with Eloise, firedog, and other related posters.

 

Jitter is completely irrelevant to data transfer, and clocking is not involved with what happens between send/receive protocol for data. The data gets there or it doesn't, and applications (including Windows, Mac OS, etc.) will give an alert if an error occurred during the transfer, including the file read. NTFS is particularly good at this, and is significantly better than FAT and FAT32 in this regard.

 

I normally would just let the thread ride itself out, but I wanted to support the earlier posts in case this ends up seeding more misinformation among less technically-savvy members of the audiophile community.

 

The only possible reason I could reconcile a difference is Eloise's proposal (if, for whatever reason, different processors are being used between the beginning and endpoint). Also, for extremely high bitrate files, there might be issues with USB bandwidth, but those issues would be very easy to identify, such as pauses in the music. When there are errors in digital, the errors are blindly evident and are not subtle by any means.

 

Without knowing more details about the OP's setup and precise circumstances, this sounds like a placebo effect, particularly without double blind testing.

 

[Jud]

Thanks, firedog, your description is helping to clear things up for me (slowly, but that's me, not the description:).

 

There are a couple of things I'm still curious about understanding better (primarily whether electrical effects are entirely responsible for sound quality differences between USB cables and integer/non-integer mode when feeding an async USB interface), but that's for another thread. I've already derailed this one a bit, for which I apologize and thank the other commenters for their forbearance and explanations.

 

[Richard Dale]

 

ted_b: In every case I was able to identify the Oyen drive...it just sounded slightly more brittle, like this Lund of equipment breaking in.....less accurate timbre, and a slight raise of the noise floor.

 

 

 

I was wondering if your Oyen drive is USB bus powered or whether it has its own power supply. I use a mains powered LaCie Firewire drive that I have on the end of a 5m Firewire cable out of the listening room and connected to a different mains outlet than my HiFi system and its mains conditioner.

 

 

 

If the Oyen is bus powered, I wonder how a similar listening test would come out when comparing a NAS to a mains powered drive configuration such as I have.

 

 

 

Replying to the OP, a factor for prefering eSATA (or Firewire) over a USB hard drive is that if you have a USB DAC, they might be sharing the same USB bus, which is a bad idea according to people on this site.

 

 

[ted_b]

It is a FireWire drive, as per my comments. I use a USB DAC so the Oyen USB port is not an option. Second, yes I power it via a wall wart because I found it to be better sonically than letting it bus power, so my fw cable has a 4 pin adapter within it to remove power. I tried it both ways, in fact, and couldn't detect enough differences to come close to the NAS sound, regardless. It's all so strange in that I make heavy use of memory playback in PM so one would think the drive connection is somewhat irrelevant.

 

P.S. Sorry for the typos on my post earlier. I meant to say "like the sound of equipment breaking in", but since it had been responded to the edit feature was removed.