[mshan]

Anybody found any perceptible difference in sound quality (e.g. due to increased jitter) from using an external USB hard drive (specificially Western Digital 500 GB My Book USB edition) as a music library, vs. using an internal IDE/SATA hard drive for the same purpose?

 

[TheSloth]

Quote:

Originally Posted by mshan /img/forum/go_quote.gif Anybody found any perceptible difference in sound quality (e.g. due to increased jitter) from using an external USB hard drive (specificially Western Digital 500 GB My Book USB edition) as a music library, vs. using an internal IDE/SATA hard drive for the same purpose?

Is that a joke?

 

[werdwerdus]

Quote:

Originally Posted by TheSloth /img/forum/go_quote.gif Is that a joke?

It made me laugh :-D

 

[werdwerdus]

But seriously, I don't think hard drives would have any effect since the data is loaded into memory anyways...

 

[mshan]

I kinda thought it wouldn't make any difference either, but am wondering whether all of that extra interfacing might introduce more jitter?

 

[joe_cool]

Jitter is not a product of bulk data transfer (hard drive to RAM buffer to sound card). Jitter became a "talking point" years ago when CD players read and played the data stream from the disc in real time. Computers that play audio data files from hard drives or use DAE to read CD audio discs don't have this problem. CD-ROM readers that output analog audio probably do.

 

[pedxing]

Most storage devices on computers today are massively buffered for enhanced performance and efficiency. All the media data is read in huge chunks, so the storage device is mostly abstracted away from jitter. There are probably other things in the chain that may cause more significant jitter, like the crappy clocks that come with most consumer level sound cards.

If you can't hear or recognize jitter, don't bother looking for it. It is asking for trouble.