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Music servers and other computer based digital audio technologies.

No

HDDs are mechanical devices. They have physically spinning platters and physically moving read/write heads. I know regular turntables have "wow," or slow speed timing variations. Do hard drives have something analogous? I know tape decks have "flutter," a high speed timing variation caused by friction between the tape and the tape heads. Could the vibration of the read/write head in an HDD cause something similar to this?

No. Even though disks are electro-mechanical in nature and may have ever so slight rotational variation they are not like LP's and tape decks where the 'music' is being 'played' in an analog fashion off the media. If this were the case, files 'recorded' to a 5400 rpm disk would sound like Alvin and the Chipmunks if played off a 7200 rpm disk. ;-)

In a correctly functioning computer, files are being read bit perfect and in this case bits ARE bits. If they weren't bit perfect the disk controller or file system would either correct the bit or report errors. Plus, the data is being cached in the onboard HDD cache and in the operating system buffers. So they aren't really being played directly off of disk anyway. And then there are players that support 'memory play' where the music file(s) are entirely cached in system DRAM.

I have to admit all of my musical archives are on HDDs. Perhaps this is why I am unable to hear the things folks report here? What are the recommended HDD brands? Or should I instead move my music to Solid State Drives? In which case too, what are the recommend brands?

Doubtful but try an SSD for yourself and see if it improves your music. In my case I heard a very slight difference with the SSD but it was no better than the HDD, just different. Most folks here have their music stored on spinning disks especially if they have a large collection.

There are only 3 (spinning rust) disk drive manufacturers left: Seagate, Western Digital, and Toshiba. All are very good, all have had problems, and all disks are susceptible to data corruption and failure. Pick your poison and make sure to archive & backup regularly.

For SSD my choice would be Intel or Samsung, and there's no good reason or benefit to choose horrendously expensive SLC SSD for a music player.


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  • No - AbeCollins 14:34:01 09/08/14 (0)

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