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[GrahamJohnMiles]

You know I wasn't going to get into this audiophile thing again. A couple of years ago I sold off my single-ended tube gear, copied all my music onto a hard drive and played it through an old Netgear MP101 music server. At the age of 61, I decided my ears didn't warrant a high-rez system so Jimmi the electrician saw my ad, listened for 30 minutes and laid a wad of cash on the table. Then I picked up a used netbook, plugged an RCA adapter in the speaker output, loaded up J River Jukebox and thought, this is not bad; convenient too being able to delete stuff on the fly. But of course it never stops there. Next purchase an external USB DAC, and then re-copy everything in WMA Lossless. Now I'm hooked again, which in a rambling way brings me to my question. I was streaming my files from a network attached drive, which sounded OK. But direct from the netbook hard drive seems to sound better. Anyone else finding this? Any idea why? Is it just the placebo effect, like when we all placed quarters on top of our speakers in the 1980's? Plus, my netbook has three USB sockets. The external DAC takes one of them. Will plugging a device in any of the others adversely affect the signal going into the DAC.

 

[esldude]

Well you might benefit from upgrading to the uDac 2SE or 2GE. Those have asynchronous USB which should greatly reduce any remaining jitter effects. I am not familiar with the uDac 2 so don't know how much of an improvement it would give you.

 

I am thinking a network storage device is not going to feed the data to the uDac as well as the hardrive on the netbook itself. As in not as well timed. Which will lead to more jitter and less good sound. I don't think you are hearing things that aren't there.

 

Whether or not attaching another device on the other USB ports will matter depends on what is added and what it is doing. It probably could, but may not.