Listening to digital music storage devices

Jan, being an engineer and a member of the AES I do find these type of 'evaluations' irritating, misleading and ultimately pointless that surely can only confuse the layperson.

The key points to note/measure would surely be the frame sizes, MTU sizes and possibly sources of RF - or the measurement of CM RF on the ethernet lead, and the spacing of the frames into the NDX and the rate of broadcoast packets etc. These are the variables, not the manufacturers of NAS types, configurations etc  as these are spurious and the parameters I mention can change from network to network or config to config. There is no magic here.

Therefore a proper engineering analysis would be to show the differning network parameters  into the NDX using Wiresharke etc and referencing that to perceived SQ. You can annotate the equipment used for each test if you wish.

This is more meaningful and wil not unneccesarily confuse, and is also controllable and determisitic in different envionments. A real missed opportunity.

Finally people like Likesmusic could quite rightly say in my opinion there should be no difference from the NDX and it should accept a wide range of network paramters and sound consistent.

Hi Simon,

I share your concerns but am surprised by your reaction. Any scientific or engineering evaluation begins with anecdotal evidence, then a hypothesis, then testing.

The article intrigued me because of the level of differences reported. The point of the article was to say « we can hear differences, we don't yet know why, but they're substantial and musically meaningful ». The authors point out that measurements under controlled conditions, combined with listening tests, are required to tests different hypotheses. 

My point in posting was to bring attention to an area for SQ improvement that seems to passing under our radar on this forum.

Jan

Ah yes - just had another look and it's looking a lot more interesting.

James

> they noted marked SQ differences according to the manner in which music was stored

and then the men in white coats came to .............................

Was it 1st April or had they been smoking something? 

Sure and my documents have less spelling mistakes when loaded from SSD rather than a Hard Drive. 

Jan, please tell me this a joke 

If you want to hear a difference then you probably will, but this kind of article does nothing for the credibility of this hobby. 

> we can hear differences, we don't yet know why

Probably they can, but it has nothing whatever to do with the storage device (unless it is broken). 

It could be a thousand things. It is not their hearing I'm doubting, but the conclusion. 

What next - identical rips sounding different because of how they were ripped? No, not even Hi-Fi Critic could claim that 

I agree with Simon's original post 100%

All the best, Guy

Possibly the 2 x 2TB striped Western Digital HDD pair offered the best steady-state noise performance? I'd have tried another chassis (non-QNAP) with that pair–I use a striped D-Link DNS-323 as one of my disk arrays at home.

Were the listening tests sighted or unsighted?

What does 'better tunefulness' mean?  Is there any evidence that such a construct will be agreed upon or consistently judged by trained or untrained listeners?

No joke. Is the article a brave move or a stupid one ? Would HiFi Critic be willing to risk their credibility ? Read the thread on their forum and draw your own conclusions ; whatever your stance on this issue, though, you're sure to find something there to bolster it...

... neither do discussions of Burndy destressing or cable directionality for that matter

and I second James' invitation to Simon to join in. It would be helpful.

Let's first establish whether the experiences reported in the article were valid, repeatable and shared by others. 

Validity is only measurable in this case by reported personal experience, unless you use the chills (goosebump) reaction to music, which is involuntary.  If the reported experiences are valid internally then they are repeatable, I would think. If they are valid externally then they would be detectable by others (shared).

To control variables, the first test would be to use a single NAS, but with different RAID configurations to see if the striped configuration does actually yield any benefits.

Has anyone done this ?

Thanks

Jan

In order to do this, a second NAS is required to store the test library, which is then copied onto the device under test.

Most importantly, striping block size would also be a consideration–increase stripe size and the number of fetches will decrease–the performances when using larger stripe sizes should tend toward that of a JBOD array; somewhere in the middle is an ideal size for music files (of what arbitrary size?).

Anyone care to define 'better tunefulness' before all sorts of pseudo-scientific gobbledegook gets postulated?

And don't forget, it is quite conceivable that sunspot activity needs to be held constant for such listening tests, at least if the SATA cable was in alignment with magnetic north.

I'll have a go.

If something is tuneful, it is pleasing to the ear, i.e., melodic or euphonious. Highly subjective of course. The authors used the phrase « lines of melody and rhythm cooperating better ».

Tell me about it : on March 13, 1989, a solar storm took down the power grid for the entire province of Québec. My music system had some of the blackest backgrounds I've ever experienced.

 Credulous neurotics and their money are soon parted.

I say: Give us some...

Well we are screwed then as Cycle 24 is really bubbling and sun spot activity is the highest since cycle 23, with a major X1.4 class  flare at 11.00 GMT today, with some of the resultant CME expected to hit Earth's magnetophere on 25th September. (This will create good Northern/Southern Lights)

Oh yes people who have 'Radio Moscow' breakthrough - you are at risk of  increased breakthrough over the coming months

Oh yes - back on topic. I compared a Mirrored netgear NAS  accessed by my  seperate WHS uPNP server with the same uPNP server streaming from its local un RAIDed disk instead of the NAS. Nil difference what-so-ever on redbook and hidef wave playback.  My frame sizes from my uPNP server to my NDX in both scenarios - un suprisingly  -were exactly the same.

THis is in a senario of NDX -> NDAC / 555PS where I can hear the benefit of putting a ferrite clamp choke around the NDX/NDAC DC1 SPDIF cable.

Simon

I should hope so. Any other result and it's money back time.

Thanks Simon - some sanity is returning. The electrical things like RFI that you speak of can definitely affect sound, but when these fellows put the differences down to where two identical digital streams originated from then I have to wonder about their motivation or perhaps they are just trying to be controversial. 

I think if a listener compares the same CD on the same system then they may hear differences, but these will be for reasons such as a change in the environment coupled with psychology.