Different hard drives sound different.

The January Absolute Sound has a sidebar in their review of the Bryston BDP-2 wherein the reviewer says that he prefers the sound of a Seagate portable hard drive over others, and that he isn't the only one. I was intrigued, so I found a Seagate portable and tried it and it did sound different from the Toshiba I was using, and I preferred the sound from the Seagate. I must admit that I don't understand why this would be so.

Of course many will say that bits is bits and it shouldn't matter, but I've found that many things that shouldn't make a difference actually do. Rectifier tubes, cables, etc., are examples. Sometimes there just doesn't seem to be an explanation why (yet).

Whatever you think, it's an interesting sidebar about something I never considered before.

 

It's an interesting thought but just think of what it might do at the mastering stage too.

 

Did they give any mention of the power supply used for the Seagate? Interconnects? What type of formatting was done to the drives?

 

could be data transfer rate or the cabling. really there can be no difference in the actual data itself as it is all 1s and 0s.

 

Seagate uses better cables. Their stock just went up 500 points on Audiogon.

 

Maybe the Toshiba drive just needs upgraded isolation points.

 

That's crazy talk.

 

The motherboard prefers Seagate. It sensed the Seagate drive and buffered the incoming data in higher fidelity RAM.

 

When it comes to Computer Audio, The Absolute Sound is the king of Bull. One thing Seagate drives are good for, in my experience, is dying. I am looking at a pile of 3 of them, all of which died with no warning and still relatively young. Don't believe every thing your read in TAS.

 

That's the reason I bought a Western Digital drive for my new build. But don't let that name fool ya. Interestingly enough it has a tube like analogue quality to it. Having a tube power supply helps with that also.

And if anyone here thought I was serious you've probably got a subscription to The Absolute Sound.

 

It's possible that the Seagate drive has a more friendly power draw over USB than the other drives. The other drives could be causing the USB ports to have dirtier power. And that dirtier power is affecting your USB DAC. I'm just making a wild guess here as to a possible explanation.

Products like the Regen and Schiit Wyrd are designed to clean up the USB power and also clean up the USB data. Perhaps using a Regen or Wyrd in front of your USB DAC would clean up the problems that the portable USB drives are causing. Try a Regen or Wyrd and see what happens. And/Or if you have a desktop computer with an extra slot you could add a USB card and dedicate that card just to audio use. No hard drives or mice or webcams or other things connected to that card and USB bus.

I haven't experimented with a Wyrd or Regen yet. Don't know what sort of improvements or changes to the sound to expect or achieve. One of these days I may try.

 

The hard drive is like sheet music.
The musician plays the notes.
The color, texture, pound weight, etc. of the paper the musician reads the music from does not affect the sound of the music they play.
Nor does your hard drive affect the music your system plays, until it dies, and plays no more.

 

The tube hard drive would sound even better.

 

If there is actually a difference in the sound of these hard drives it probably would be related to the USB power for the drives. I'm skeptical, though, and The Absolute Sound has too extensive a history of this kind of b___s___ to place any stock in what it might say.

 

I don't believed this but I now only use GT tech drives. So far the only ones that's haven't died on me. More $ but solid. But I've never heard differences sound wise.

 

I have an internal Samsung SSD and an outboard 2.5" Samsung spinner via USB 3.0. I can't hear a single difference, but honestly that's just a little too far into the weeds for me. Then, I do have an optimized OS and LPSU power for the mainboard, CPU, and sound card That honestly did help, it killed an electrical noise I could otherwise not get under control. I could power the SSD via the LPSU too, folks at computeraudiophile rave about that but with my luck I'd wire it wrong and bork the drive and the music that's on it. No thanks.

 

Seagate-gate.

 

Yup. This. I've had bad luck with Seagate as well...Western Digital Red and the newer Greens have treated me well!

Listening to TAS when it comes to computer audio is like an engineer taking tips from the Pope on matters of science. Perilous.

 

I prefer 5 1/2" floppy drives myself - much more analog like.

 

If you mean G-Technology, they are owned by WD and I'll let you guess which HDD's they use.

 

Well they are solid and have been working great for me

 

One way that this could be mitigated would be to put a small amount of solid state memory in a device so that the data transferred into it wasn't coming directly from the drive, but would be temporarily stored in the device itself somehow... would eliminate the nuances in magnetic drive fidelity.

It would be awesome if there was a way to do that... we probably don't have the technology yet.

 

As a computer professional, just no. Basically everything in the post is complete lunacy, sorry. It all gets buffered to RAM already.

 

JRiver has a setting to play directly from RAM, so no, not in all cases does it get buffered to RAM.