Audiophiles - Review of different hard drives affecting the sound...

beed84

Rocker said:

The trashcan is the best place to store your MP3s on your computer. Calm down guys. It is hard to type when laughing so much......

People in glass houses and all that...

Rocker

Sorry @beed84, I do not get your point. Please elaborate..... Thanks.

beed84

The OP was light-heartedly made fun of by others and admonished with the phrase "People in glass houses should not throw stones." Ironically, we're being laughed at for the things we're saying.  Surely it's unfair to criticise the jokes/opinions made but then also laugh at them, and also the article itself.

If I'm off the mark, apologies, but that's the impression I get.

imalone

Okay,
"QNAP1 was found to serve up music with a similar level of rhythmic drive and image soundstaging as a good CD transport playing directly into our system's DAC. If anything, there was perceptibly more 'drive', in the sense of bass euphony and articulation, but this came with increased level which made the sound a tad bass heavy."

"Also, QNAP1 did not sound as clean as CD in the higher registers. Some edgy grain exaggerated the sampled horns that sets the scene in the opening of Primal Scream's Loaded, adding to the color but nudging it off neutrality. Splash cymbals lived up to their name"

What happens when you have a NAS connected to a computer and play audio off it?
The player will open the file and start to read data. This request goes through the operating system, which will send a request to the NAS to retrieve that data. Without any explicit instruction from the player it will most likely read ahead and transfer more data than has been requested to cache in memory. Whether or not this happens the requested data will have been transferred across and into memory before the player gets access to it. At this point, unless the audio is in a pure wav-like format, the player will pass the data to a codec to convert it to audio samples, this gets done by the CPU, which will write the decoded data back to another buffer in memory. Samples from this now need to get to the audio device. This gets a bit more complicated. The simple way to do it is to push all the data (the entire track) to the sound device at once, but this would give you no ability to stop or pause playback, so more typically the OS audio layer gets to request data from the application, which supplies more audio from its buffer as requested, in PulseAudio on Linux that can be up to 2 second chunks, though less would be typical to allow for a more responsive experience. It will be decoded ahead of time so there is always data waiting, otherwise you would glitch at dropped frames. The OS layer is then responsible for mixing streams from different applications, possibly re-sampling different frame rates and adjusting levels, before feeding it to the audio device's hardware buffer, via a device driver. This is a 'ring buffer', in that it has a fixed length which gets read round and round over and over again at the playback rate.
Edit, reading material: http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6735?page=0,1 http://freedesktop.org/software/pulseaudio/doxygen/streams.html

Sooo... the hard disc doesn't come into it once the data has been read from disc. The decoded data is all held in memory, there's no scope for samples to be modulated by their hard disc source, and once they get to the sound card / DAC they get played back at the playback rate, independent of how the data is coming in. If data doesn't come fast enough (due to CPU overload or the disc stops sending) then the playback is starved of samples and you either get silence or a glitch.
Hence the general incredulity about EQ-like modulation dependent on the particular NAS attached. Particularly good is "soundstaging as a good CD transport playing directly into our system's DAC" which is doing exactly the same thing. Heck, they've even got the DAC separate from the decoder, presumably connected by that S/PDIF output.

You could make a case, especially if the hardware was in the same box and not in a NAS, for noise on the power supply and bus noise getting into a soundcard. But that's going to be noise (and you can hear it on cheap onboard sound on a PC, to the point I can actually tell what my work computer is doing if I've got headphones on and nothing playing), not a difference in bass drive.

The only conclusion then is that they're just making it up.

One last thought, my computer isn't entirely well at the minute. It's got an SATA thing going where it sometimes pauses and resets the drive, during which time programs can be unresponsive. Buffering on audio playback is such that *music will continue playing while the drive is resetting itself*. How, under that situation, could the hard disc possibly affect bass drive, particularly if I was using an external DAC?

chrispy108

beed84 said:

The OP was light-heartedly made fun of by others and admonished with the phrase "People in glass houses should not throw stones." Ironically, we're being laughed at for the things we're saying.  Surely it's unfair to criticise the jokes/opinions made but then also laugh at them, and also the article itself.

If I'm off the mark, apologies, but that's the impression I get.

Just to be 100% clear, I posted it entirely to mock, I've got a Physics degree....

CabbageCat

Rocker said:

The trashcan is the best place to store your MP3s on your computer. Calm down guys. It is hard to type when laughing so much......

How do you know MP3 are no good until you've tried all of them? There is a percentage chance that all the ones you've heard are rubbish and that all the others are great.

That'll be £2830, please.

ToneControl

Danny1969 said:

ToneControl said:

Axe_meister said:

Skipped said:

Last year I started listening to 24/192 versions of my favourite albums.
Shortly after buying a usb DAC for my laptop I started to notice comments on forums saying that the digital files must be on the main hard drive - not on a usb hard drive - because the second usb port may be on the same circuit as the usb DAC.
I have so far ignored this....

Lol. The fact is the DAC will have a read a head buffer so unless the USB is soooooo saturated that the DAC can't get the info quick enough there will be zero difference, even USB 1 would be able to keep up with reading music from a USB stick and writing to a USB DAC.

I was playing mp3 files straight from floppy disks in the early 90s, (when hard disks were smaller than today's memory sticks)

Is anyone really thinking that modern computers have trouble handling an mp3?
you can record many tracks of WAVs in parallel to a normal PC's hard disk now

A floppy drive was 1.4Mb so that would have been very low bit rate MP3's you listened to ... maybe you meant a superdisk which was about 120mb I think ....

no, a 3.5 inch disk, 128kb mp3 (just a short one to test that the data transfer rate could do it - to show what was possible)
you had to make your mp3s on the command line then, using the Fraunhofer DOS software