External HD VS Flash Drive Sound Quality Question

Moomoo,

I found the Seagate external HD's to have noisy fans. Try before you buy.

Al, I am using a powered Seagate. I believe I stated that above. My original question did reference underpowered WD's which I would have preferred to avoid the power quality issue); but the price on the Seagate was too good to pass up.

Does anyone know if Robert Harley has written on these issues? In the past I found that I often heard similar to how he did (he also recommended my SUPERB PS Audio SL3 DA during an in store many years ago; which was the only blind mail order purchase II ever made before the Oppo.

Weatherb, my Oppo's fan is louder from my listening seat than that of the Seagate!

And in 3 months or so, the central heat will be 5 times louder than the 2 combined............

I had my first (non counterfeit) Flash Drive die tonight. It was a 3 week old Lexar, which WAS my go to brand.

It was 64 gb, Anecdotally they seem to die more often than smaller ones do. Fortunately, all files were backed up on 3 separate hard drives, & fortunately Fred Meyer gave me a no hassle exchange with no receipt.

I've had a couple of HP's & a Verbatim get flakey, but this one totally died. Windows couldn't read it, & neither could my Oppo.

The moral of the story: ALWAYS back up ANY music file (burned cdr, dvdr or file) that you can't easily replace.

Hopefully this one will last longer than the three weeks I got from the last one........

I mention counterfeit above as I ordered 2 Sandisks a few months back from I Offer (the net's fav boot auction site) not knowing they were from China. They were worthless. The seller refused to do anything; Pay Pal refunded my money with no requirement to ship back to China

It's been a bit frustrating how long it's taking me to do a series of comparisons. Combination of life, & I'm also a movie fan. While my main system is optimized for music (& is stereo, NOT 5.1); I also use it for film. For the sake of these comparisons, system is stock Oppo BDP-95 with an after market power cord that I don't currently remember the name of (it was recommended her), connected by Tara Pandora to a Mod Squad Line Drive Deluxe (same electronics are the first McCormick model), which is connected by Tara Analog standard to a McCormick DNA 1 Mod 12 (mod done by Conrad Johnson); connected by Tara Omni bi wired speaker wire to a pair of NHT 2.5 I's (IMO the system's weak point).

Did another brief comparison tonight; the 1st 2 tracks from Peter Gebriel's Scratch My back (Heroes & Boy In The Bubble) in 24/48.

Tonight I intentionally played them through the Seagate first. Sounded quite nice; I was thinking there was no way the Flash drive would be better.

I was wrong. The Adata Flash had a slightly bette sense of midrange liquidity, sound staging & air.

I'm still not finished; but am continuing to come to the conclusion that the HD is much more convienient; and that in my system the Adata (which I've done all comparisons on so far) is slightly better.

As the weak point in my system (imo) is a lack of detail in the NHT's, I'm guessing in a system with a higher level of resolution the differences would be more pronounced.

I'm still not feeling this is definitive, though.

For times where listening isn't the #1 focus, if it wasn't for the bloody 1-2 second gap the Oppo's flac decoder puts between tracks (wav's also), I would probably be ripping & selling most of my cd's. The HD is certainly good enough for 99% of 44/16 cd's. Of course an option is to edit certain tracks together, but there is only so much time in this life!

One other issue with that idea; as far as I can tell, with 44/16 the Oppo only sees HDCD on real discs, not in files (again both flac & wav).