Choice of USB drive affects sound quality for Node (Gen 3)?
I compared at least four different designs of USB powered hard drives from a USB stick, to an external solid state SSD drive, to USB drives with a physical disk that must be powered with via the bus. My experience is that there is a difference in sound quality, with the physical HDD disks sounding “flat”, “dull” and “slow” compared to solid state and flash drives when used with a Bluesound Node functioning as music server. I discovered this because when I first got the Node, the only music I had on disk that wasn’t on my computer was on a small flash drive. I bought a cheap external USB bus powered HDD hard drive and I was disappointed with the sound compared with the flash drive - same files, same format, same cuts. Just dull and flat sounding. Yuk. I tried a different brand bus powered HDD hard drive, a little better. I tried a SSD drive, sounds much closer to the 16GB flash drive. Now I use the 2TB SSD drive for serving music and the hard drives for file backup. One of the drives tested was a WD Elements HDD 2TB external drive. The worst sounding to me. One was a Seagate One Touch 2TB external drive, slightly better sounding to me. One was a ScanDisk 2TB Extreme Portable SSD, noticeably better sounding. One was a 16GB flash drive from Target, slightly better sounding to me than the ScanDisk SSD. The Western Digital and Seagate HDDs use the same USB 3.0 connection and the ScanDisk SSD uses a USB C cable. For the two HDD drives I used the same stock cable that came with one of them. For the SSD, I used the stock USB C cable that came with it. The two HDD and the SSD drives are all external drives, in their own case and connected with a cable to the Node. Has anyone else experienced this sound quality issue related to USB drive type with their Node functioning as a file server?
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I have the same problem. I found out when I connected my CD player to my Node 2i. What a beautiful sound I thought and what a difference with the music on my hard drive. This hard drive is connected to my router. Then i put a number of files on a USB stick. This stick connected to my Node 2i and then it sounded much better. But I want to control my music via the router since I occasionally put new music on it. So I don't know what I can do about this either.
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So, do you think the sound quality issue is with your hd or your router? The more devices and cables in the chain, the more chances for sound quality to degrade. Lots has been written on how to improve digital sound. I would suggest plugging your HD directly into your Node via USB cable and just unhooking it and attaching to your computer when you want to update music files. That is what I do. But depending on what kind of HD you are using, it still might not match sound quality of files stored on USB stick. My guess is that non solid state hard drives have relatively high power draw from Node which is harmful to the sound. If you find a solution that works for you, please report back here.
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It's getting weirder. All my music is in ALAC format. This music is on my external hard drive connected to my router. I did a test with a USB stick. This USB stick with four different file formats of the same song seems to sound better already. AIFF, WAV and FLAC sound the same, but the ALAC version sounds flat. That's pretty weird, since FLAC and ALAC should have the same quality. I am now considering converting my ALAC music collection to FLAC and putting it on a drive. Then I connect this drive wired to my Node 2i.
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Interesting. I have most everything saved as AIFF files because I started out in digital audio on iTunes and macs, and then I read this from a respected DAC designer.
I also have quite a few flac music files and I can tell no difference between flac and aiff soundwise. I generally can tell the difference between low and high bit rate and sampling frequency versions of the same recording.
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