I apologize that I've neglected this thread & the testing. I just haven't had the time to do it thoroughly; while I live in a house my neighbors are quite close & the best time for me is late night when I can't crank it up because of the neighbors.
That said, my current INCOMPLETE conclusion is that for unknown reasons the Flash Drives do sound a bit better than the hard drive; though 96/24 on the Hard Drive still beats the heck out of 44/16 on a cd.
For specifics please see my earlier posts. I will still try to flesh this out eventually.
On the other hand, i am starting to see Flash Drive quality go downhill; especially Lexar which used to be my go to brand. I've had 3 recent manufacture Lexars fail in the last month; & the latest I bought a series new to me called the S23 is the flimsiest Flash drive I have ever seen, though so far it works perfectly.
So far I've never had a bad Adata, nor a bad Sandisk (other than 2 obvious Chinese counterfeit Sandisks I bought on Ioffer). I own around 50 Flash drives; the only total failures have been the 3 Lexars, the 2 fake Sandisks & a no name 64 gb drive that a friend loaned me last year. I've also found HP to be very flaky, but never had a total failure.
I do practice redundant backups on all hi-res music just to make sure. Most of my hi res stuff is on either disc or Flash; + 2-3 external hard drives in addition.
