External HD VS Flash Drive Sound Quality Question

It's definitely putting out a lower (digital) volume level than discs or flash drives. No idea why. Not a big deal, I'd say I'm turning the volume control 1-2 clock markings higher

If so, I'd expect that the reason is not that the hard drive is "putting out" a lower volume than the discs or flash drives, but that for some reason the player is treating the data that is received from the hard drive differently than the data that is received from the other media. Perhaps shifting the data within each sample by one bit location, at some point in the data path, which would probably result in a 6 db change in volume.

Regards,
-- Al

A couple more quick comments: I'm going to break what I said above about waiting:

1. The volume issue was me; I'm too embarrassed to say what I did, bit it was me.

2. WITHOUT a/b ing at all, my initial reaction is that other than missing HDCD (the Oppo only encodes HDCD on discs), 44/16 sounds fine; based on memory 44/16 sounds just as good as it does on disc. As I may have to do a major physical downsize, I may end up ripping most discs to hd's.

3. I hear very little difference WITH THE HARD DRIVE between hi-res & 44/16. Based on memory alone, the Flash drives & real discs are much better on hi res. Don't know if it's my imagination, or a cable issue; but that's what I'm hearing.

The Oppo's strength is sound staging & depth on high res material, & at least today that strength is almost totally gone with hi-def files played back through the USB HD (identical files to those I've been playing on the Flash Drives).

Again, I will report back in a couple weeks, though I do not expect to have the money to try audiophile cabling options in the meantime so that will remain a variable.

Thanks for the update Moomoo. I hope you can get those high res files sounding like they should. I'm looking forward to hearing more on your findings.

I still haven't spent enough time, but my initial reaction is on hi-res with the BDP-95 The Flash Drives seem to sound quite a bit better. I so far haven't heard much difference with 44/16, though.

I need to spend more time before I make that statement definitively, though.

The main comparison I did was the 96/24 Flac version of Keith Jarrett - Koln Concert. The Flash seemed to have more air, better soundstaging, definition & more detail; the hard drive was a bit bright in the loud passages where the Flash was not.

Identical files.

I'm compelled to create an account instead of lurking. There should be no direct difference in sound quality due to hard drive or ssd or usb cables. The files are transferred to the Oppo as files and Oppo does the conversion from file in Oppo memory to audio and the differences in components discussed here shouldn't make any real difference. To put it another way, if you put your bank statements on a hard drive, flash drive, or SSD and then tried to read it over a USB cable, would you expect to get different results on the computer? Would your bank statements be more accurate if you used an audiophile quality USB cable? The data is transferred and then opened by Excel (or whatever) and displayed. The frequency at which errors would happen in the transfer from data source to computer would be extremely low. If you trust bank statements or homework to these storage technologies, then the audio files are just as reliable in terms of 100% fidelity after transfer.

With that said...I do own an Oppo 103 and switched to using an SSD since it seems my wireless network couldn't transfer high-res 5.1 files fast enough for continuous play (really choppy buffering problems like when you try to watch a video online and it just can't keep up and buffers). But the hard drive transfer rate over USB is much faster and more reliable than a crappy wireless connection. There is a big difference between not having sufficient bandwidth (buffering problems and no continuous play) and loss in fidelity or sound with continuous play (which should NOT happen).

The only other source of differences would be from some subtle interactions in stuff other than pure transfer issues (does the power source interfere in some way with other cables, etc.). Personally, I would suspect the impact is reasonably low for reasonable hardware. The most annoying sound impact that I can think of would be that some spinning disks I've owned I can actually here them spin and the heads move (you can hear on computer boot up...the ticking that isn't from the fan). This is worse if the data is fragmented. Defrag your spinning disks! :) SSD don't have the problem since there are no moving parts.