
Significant sound quality differences between digital music storage technologies - lelf
http://enjoythemusic.com/hificritic/vol5_no3/listening_to_storage.htm
======
tunesmith
People are passing this off as silly, but there's a valid concern here -
whether the lossless compression algorithms can actually infect the source
material based off of how it interacts with the hardware. I've noticed this
myself while coding - late at night, my software works great when it is all
uncompressed and spread out in my IDE, but after I commit it (undoubtedly to
remote hard drives that compress my code), it's pulled by others, and
sometimes those other people experience bugs. The bug didn't happen for me
when it was uncompressed in my IDE. But after the compression/decompression
cycle of committing/pulling, it's obvious that the code sometimes gets
infected by the hard drives themselves. If you're in a silent room when you
push to github, you can actually hear the alterations if you listen really,
really hard.

~~~
TrainedMonkey
That is a very serious problem I often face myself. I found that having a
cactus near the monitor influences the way information is encoded and
perceived. When a person that does not have a cactus tries to run my code,
they could face cactus not found and sometimes even cactus panic issues.
Solution of course is to bring my cactus to their workstation; it is obvious
that a reboot is required so that workstation could recognize new peripheral
plantware. Working with servers is much harder, but waving a cactus in front
of terminal window and changing font color to green had been proven to work.

------
commentzorro
These tests are all horribly flawed and are in effect measuring the same
error: edge cadence. When you pack the bits on a drive they are compressed and
if you pull them back off and send them directly to your DAC you haven't give
the bit edges a chance to expand back to their natural state. Hence the
distorting edge cadence. The only way to truly remove this effect is to stage
the bits in a ram disk and let them rest. Minimum of two minutes but if you
can, five minutes allows full expansion of the soundscape. Then you send the
stream from the ram disk on to your DAC and, voila, no edge cadence and
prefect sound every time!

~~~
seanp2k2
Too bad we missed our chance to demo the new ($2,499) edge-cadence eliminating
audiophile quality PCI-E cache (with pure gold connectors) SSD at CES. It's
all point-to-point wired with 12 gauge cryo-treated OFC solid conductor wire
sheathed in Techflex for the best possible quality. We also have a balanced
model coming out which uses three separate 1x PCI-E slots for L/R/ground to
decrease cross-talk (and obviously jitter).

~~~
igrekel
We need to talk, this could be complementary to our $5,430 air stabilizing
chamber prevent turbulence to create lens effect that boost the interference
of cosmic rays and still get through the techflex. We also offer the option to
replace the air inside the chamber with a neutral gaz. Its helps to prevent
the changes in temperature and therefore thermal expansion of the copper wires
and gold plating to create unwanted variation in signal.

~~~
miles932
Why is nobody addressing the neutrino coloration issues at the heart of the
issue? We offer a private listening space ($599 an hour) unlike any other,
lined with a few light-years of lead (substantially compressed) to prevent a
minority of neutrinos from creating aberrant distortions in source material.
Together with the vibration-reducing space-time deformation we create by
putting this much mass in one place, we've heard from several noted
audiophiles that this is the only true way to reveal the music the way the
artist intended.

------
malchow
Finally someone caught on to this problem.

140 years ago my great-grandfather dug a palladium mine anticipating exactly
these problems with internal disk drive components causing imperfections in
audio playback. The steers grazing the grass above the mines were fed gold
putty so as to increase the conductivity of their excrement. Over the years
this has resulted in superconductive minerals in the earth beneath my house.

As a result, for most of my life I have enjoyed unmolested audio, because we
store our files on handmade disk drives whose internal components were hewn of
this superconductive mineral. There was one time in 1994 when a cousin, who'd
briefly slipped the bonds of his reeducation room, tried to use copper solder
from RadioShack to fix a transistor to a PCB for use inside one of my drives.
We haven't had any issues with imperfect sound once we killed him.

Sometimes we can hear a train whistle from down the road, though. That's
annoying.

------
matthewmcg
This is a joke right?

"Penguin Café Orchestra's Union Café has an altogether more natural recorded
acoustic. On Scherzo and Trio QNAP1 promoted the leading edge piano
transients, following through with a lighter, brighter instrument tone –
possibly Steinway-like? The same piano had more lower mid body on QNAP2 and
slightly softer hammer impact, perhaps more like a Bosendörfer.

That hint of glaze on QNAP1 also showed an impaired subjective noise floor
elsewhere. In hi-ﬁ parlance, QNAP2 had the blacker silences and deeper spaces
between notes. If anything, this track highlighted a fundamental shift in
timbre between the storage sources. This wasn't the gentle tweak of a DAC's
digital filter option; we felt it was more akin to changing loudspeakers.
System sound was improved as if the DAC itself had been upgraded, say from a
£500 to a £2000 model."

~~~
ultramancool
I can only assume this is a joke pointed at audiophiles, the sort who promote
the 192khz/24 bit music.

[http://xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-
young.html](http://xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html)

~~~
desdiv
I'm think this is yet another case of Poe's law at work. As far as I can tell,
this was published in a bonafide audiophile magazine and that the authors were
dead serious.

Here are some skeptics discussing the article:
[http://forums.naimaudio.com/topic/listening-to-digital-
music...](http://forums.naimaudio.com/topic/listening-to-digital-music-
storage-devices)

------
beloch
"Fellow computer audio enthusiast (and Naim PR person) Stephen Harris and I
launched into some preliminary listening tests, to establish under reasonably
controlled conditions if audible, repeatable differences could really be
heard. We readily confirmed that the final sound quality is influenced not
only by the choice of network player, DAC, digital cables, or indeed many
other long-recognized factors, but additionally — and quite markedly — by the
manner in which we now store large quantities of our music at home."

First, the nature of the tests conducted is not adequately described. Were
they double blind ABX? Second, they confirmed a sound difference between
digital cables, which many others have utterly failed to do in double-blind
ABX tests. This suggests to me that their testing methodology is deeply flawed
and the author should be disregarded unless he posts more details.

------
wiredfool
IF there is a significant difference in the quality of sound between one brand
of disks in a NAS and another, then something is seriously broken or badly
designed in the DAC.

On the other hand, I don't trust those who don't do controlled experiments to
have unbiased conclusions on audio gear.

Way back when I cared about audio, I was listening to some high end
(~10k/component) cd player + power supply at a Naim dealer. The sales guy was
raving about the sound, but it was just wrong to me. The soundstage was just
wrong. Weirdly sideways. After a going back and forth a few times, visual
inspection proved the speakers were wired out of phase. So, not controlled
experiment, and not a magazine columnist doing the miswiring, but if you can't
tell when the basics aren't right, how can you expect to hear nth order
effects?

------
api
Are audiophiles the most irrational consumers? They seem to be quite a bit
more sillypants than the new agey alt-med crowd. Homeopathy is almost
certainly just a fancy placebo, but the attempts I've read at putting a modern
theory under homeopathy (e.g. water having state memory) actually sound less
cuckoo than the stuff I see on audiophile sites.

------
Joeboy
Assuming this is sincere, I find the most striking thing about it to be the
mismatch between the high quality of the writing and the extreme silliness of
the conclusions.

~~~
ptx
Have you tried reading the article over gigabit ethernet? I find that, as
compared to wifi, it makes the writing slightly more dry but adds punch to the
conclusion.

------
joezydeco
This test obviously could benefit from a Blackbody Ambient Field Conditioner
(MSRP $1,323, now discontinued)

[http://www.lessloss.com/blackbody-p-200.html](http://www.lessloss.com/blackbody-p-200.html)

~~~
CompanyLaser
Let us not forget the importance of vibration control for digital devices!
[http://shop.mapleshadestore.com/products.asp?dept=127](http://shop.mapleshadestore.com/products.asp?dept=127)

~~~
joezydeco
I use one of these under my laptop and my code compiles faster and runs a lot
quicker!

------
netik
TCP buffers, and caching eliminate any argument about Jitter that one could
pose on this issue. Timing of file transfer and playback rate on the DAC are
not linked, so this study is absurdly flawed.

------
g8oz
If these people ever learned the meaning of "double blind" would their heads
explode?

~~~
joezydeco
They know the meaning, and actively argue against it:

[http://www.stereophile.com/content/listening-143](http://www.stereophile.com/content/listening-143)

[http://www.theabsolutesound.com/forums/threads/13/](http://www.theabsolutesound.com/forums/threads/13/)

------
jorjordandan
I have also noticed that the content of blog articles varies slightly
depending on who manufactures the ram that I'm using - related issue?

------
Havoc
Surely this is a joke? Not only are the bitstreams coming from the hdd
digital, they're also buffered and decoded. I can see different decoders
affecting the sound, but not the hdd.

------
GrinningFool
So the measurement of output quality is just... the reviewer's ear?

Moving along.

~~~
Florin_Andrei
Trained, experienced individuals with excellent hearing can be used as
"detectors" quite well in blind studies. That's not the issue.

The real crux of the matter is that the article is an example of Poe's law.
It's satire, but very well done.

~~~
MaysonL
Transposing Clarke's law: sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable
from sincere bullshit. (And, of course, vice versa.)

------
folecr
Have these guys heard of caching?

------
massaman_yams
The usual dogma among those with a passing familiarity with digital audio
seems to be to the effect of, "Bits are bits - it doesn't matter where they
come from."

This, as it turns out, is not entirely correct. Jitter can be a substantial
problem in digital transport and does have well-understood effects on overall
sound quality, and certain DAC designs are much better at jitter rejection
than others.

Here, it's a bit of a stretch, but not entirely outside the realm of
possibility for jitter to be affected at varying levels by the storage system
in use, though there are a lot of variables here (router, UnitiServe, and Naim
NDX) that may not have been adequately isolated.

That being said, I don't deny that there's a substantial amount of 'snake oil'
in the audiophile industry, and reviews like this should be considered with
some skepticism - but that shouldn't mean we dismiss them outright.

I would, of course, like to see tests indicating these differences, as - if
they exist - they will be quantifiable with the right equipment, e.g., an
Audio Precision analyzer.

~~~
pslam
No, jitter is not a problem. It is more than a stretch to go from "jitter as a
theoretical problem" to "jitter as an actual problem" \- it is absurd. Don't
even give this credence.

The only way to make jitter audible is to do it deliberately, to the extent
that the DAC would have difficulty even locking to it. At that point, it would
likely end up dropping samples, and we're not really talking about digital
audio any more.

Audio marketing has been using crap like "digital jitter" as one of their
snake oil sales tools for as long as digital audio has been commonplace. Don't
give it even the slightest amount of publicity.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
You must be unfamiliar with the AES and other papers that describe audible
jitter and the threshold at which it starts to become audible. See e.g.

"Eric Benjamin and Benjamin Gannon, "Theoretical and Audible Effects of Jitter
on Digital Audio Quality", Preprint 4826 of the 105th AES Convention, San
Francisco, September 1998"

or

"The Effects of Sampling Clock Jitter on Nyquist Sampling Analog-to-Digital
Converters, and on Oversampling Delta-Sigma ADCs, 87th Convention of the Audio
Engineering Society, October, 1989"

or

Ashihara and Kiryu, etc (2005)

[https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/ast/26/1/26_1_50/_pdf](https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/ast/26/1/26_1_50/_pdf)

~~~
pslam
I am quite familiar and in fact that paper concludes that jitter is _not_
detectable in normal consumer equipment:

"About 25% of the listeners detected jitter when its size was 500ns. When it
was 250ns, however, no listener could discriminate the sounds."

...

"Nishimura and Koizumi made attempts to measure actual jitter of various DA
systems during reproduction of music signals. They could not detect any jitter
larger than 3ns in their measurements."

...

"So far, actual jitter in consumer products seems to be too small to be
detected at least for reproduction of music signals"

...

CONCLUSION "The threshold values seem to be sufficiently larger than the
jitter actually observed in various consumer products."

~~~
cnvogel
You should point out that typical jitter on the digital interface will be in
the order of few 100 PICOSECONDS...

~~~
Joeboy
and is totally unrelated to any jitter on the storage system (unless it's so
slow that it can't keep up with the DAC, which is unlikely to happen unless
it's a 20th century hard drive or connected by a wireless/internet
connection).

