[Shadin]

Quote:

If this is what they meant by it sounding better/different then it's a total non-issue when strapped to a CLAS or Fostex...
 
Fostex tops up ipod so battery issue is a non-issue.

Actually I'm pretty sure he was being facetious, haha.

 

[oohms]

Quote:

 Actually power cords do make a huge difference. They can effect resistance of the incoming AC wave. They can effect Volt Amps Reactive and just amperage in general. That is why power cords are UL rated for certain amperage level the more stable current you have the better the system will sound. The way this effects digital is because the power cord can add noise or not add as much noise and AC is a signal is a sound wave basically a quiet power cord with good current and low resistance will give you stable 60hz signal many digital clocks base their clock frequency off of incoming 60hz signal if the signal is distorted or clipped or noisy in any way it will effect analog as well as digital signals.  Stop criticizing people for things you don't understand and haven't heard different equipment enough to understand. 
As for the buffer issue HDD vs SSD Just because you have a "jitter reducting buffer" doesn't mean it is free of jitter, or "better sounding" If you never have to introduce error correction or do any buffering it will sound better because it won't have to fix the damage done by jitter because there will be no jitter. This is exactly why sofisticated transports do sound magnitudes better than others. the Esoteric are a good example of this. They have very little digital glare and a lot more air and transparency No error correction is the best and I would believe that SSD would achieve this result in a better way. 

They are UL rated for a certain amperage because any more current and they can heat up and melt
 
No audio gear (except maybe old record players) use the mains frequency for timing... and if that were the case, you would want a 'bad' power cord that filters out as much outside 50/60 hz as possible
AC mains is converted to DC, and filtered as much as possible. AC noise of any kind in a DC power supply is not wanted, and input AC voltages and noise are not supposed to affect the output DC voltage.
 
A buffer in computer terms (an ipod would be considered a computer in this context) is where data is prefetched before it is needed (off a hdd or ssd in this case) and temporarily stored in ram. It then is read straight out of ram using the computer's internal clock. Several thousand samples are usually stored at any one time.
The only possible way the signal could come out not in sync with the computer clock is if there is buffer underrun, which you would easily hear as 'glitching' in the audio.
 
 

 
Quote:

What HiFi FOR METAL explained for jitter and buffer is clear and rational. People who don't get it should consider learning more before passing judgement. Go study more about physics in electronic and wave field. Try experimenting stuff like different cables and buffer IC to understand what ultra fast buffer stands for. If you don't understand when someone say something, you don't need to brag yourself or accusing someone having misconception or being irrational. It's quite pathetic.
 
As for cables in powercord and interconnects, they change factors of R C and L values in electricity from what I studied in university. Larger cable reduced R but also increases C. Higher purity cable (all copper or all silver) improves L. There's also stuff like vibration control that affect L and C. Increasing R helps controlling vibration effects but trading with delay and less current...etc. How do those values like R for impedance and ratio of L:C affect sound and harmonics? If you study enough, you'll understand. I'm not encouraging people to buy expensive cable but you should know it can't be just any cable. I used to buy a few grands of cables but now made my own under few hundreds and I'm more satisfied with that.
 
Sadly that some people know only little yet they think they know all about things they really should be. And those people with closed heart usually have strong conviction enough to nullify all explanations that may change it. 

Larger diameter cable (of the same length) reduces R.
When talking about wire, C is only between conductors. It has to do with surface area of each conductor and properties of the insulation between them.
L is usually a property of thickness and length, but also increases if you coil the wire
 
Reflections are a much higher frequency phenomenon, and to date i have never seen an expensive audio cable advertise that they minimise this. Coax cable is designed to minimise this at certain frequencies (several hundred mhz+)
 

 
Quote:

Miku39 sorry for taking so long to respond. to answer your question Error correction doesn't add jitter it just cannot fix all of it Jitter is a timing based distortion so any time domain changes in clock speed and timing effect the sound in phase coherence, sound stage, and frequency recomposition. basically the less fixing you have to do post facto the better the result, because the error correction can't reconstitute data or timing information that isn't there, or if it is there the error correction can only do so much to fix a jitter damaged signal. I can tell you that I have heard 4000 dollar clocks put on really good CD players and heard it make a huge difference it was as if I stepped forward a few rows in a live instrumental concert I heard better attack and decay artifacts and the like. The transport and clock and the effects of jitter can effect timbre, as well as pace rythm , and timing. Compared to analog digital doesn't usually convey decay all that well, There are exceptions with better clocks and jitter control and the like, but this is why the small differences can make a huge difference in the realism of a signal. 
 
in an SSD vs HD comparison I would imagine that HDD with it's read mechanism would potentially impart more jitter than SSD Cashing probably avoids much of this, but I am not sure what it is cashing it could be cashing with already jitter laiden signals and therefore SSD would eliminate much of this intrinsic jitter. Much of this technology needs to be tested and better testing for jitter made right now we can only theoretically test beyond 10 pico seconds of jitter there are no scopes that can test beyond this at this point even though less jitter artifacts are still audible and effect every part of the signal. Reconstitution of a digital signal after it is damaged is like trying to added image stabilisation to a shaky video, you can "correct" for this in post but your images will still look magnitudes better without any shaking" the same applies to jitter.  

You can re-clock a digital stream to have exactly as much (or little) jitter as the clock of the re-clocker
 
The nature of how computers cache audio (as explained above) conflicts with that explanation
 

 

[AKG240mkII]

Quote:

Actually I'm pretty sure he was being facetious, haha.

About the cryo-cable, yes .
But I'm serious about the HDD ..
It DOES create noise and vibrations and
it draws 450 mAmps when spinning up .
It would probably draw even more if it wasn't limited on the board !
(And you have a battery that can output it ! The standard 30GB 5/5.5 iPod has a 480 mAmp battery IIRC )
That may actually starve the headphone-amp, causing the soundstage to 'break up' during HDD-activity . 
 
 
 
 
 

 

[Shadin]

Quote:

About the cryo-cable, yes .
But I'm serious about the HDD ..
It DOES create noise and vibrations and
it draws 450 mAmps when spinning up .
It would probably draw even more if it wasn't limited on the board !
(And you have a battery that can output it ! The standard 30GB 5/5.5 iPod has a 480 mAmp battery IIRC )
That may actually starve the headphone-amp, causing the soundstage to 'break up' during HDD-activity . 
 
 
 
 
 

Music doesn't play from the HDD, it plays from the buffer.  There's no perceptible HDD activity when music is being played.
 

 

[Lillee]

Since it's plugged into a Fostex and being topped up power wise from it then this is a non-issue

 

[AKG240mkII]

Quote:

Music doesn't play from the HDD, it plays from the buffer.  There's no perceptible HDD activity when music is being played.
 

How do you load the data (music) into the buffer without spinning up the HDD ??
And YES, data IS sometimes read into the buffer while the pod is playing ..
 
 
Quote:

Since it's plugged into a Fostex and being topped up power wise from it then this is a non-issue

It's a non-issue because you are not using the head-phone amp .
 
I own both a HDD and a CF-card modded 30GB iPod 5.5G and they DON'T sound the same when the
HDD-lamp is blinking .
At first I didn't believe it either and put it down to some placebo-effect caused by
my joy in having completed the mod .. But it STILL sounded better weeks later and
browsing the sourcecode for rockbox gave a pretty good explanation for why !
 
 
 
 
 

 

[Lillee]

Yeah I am now rocking a new 240GB 7th Gen on the HP-P1 and no, there's no difference in sound quality from the iPhone 4S when running it on the HP-P1