Nov 2007
Hard drives sound better than CD?
15/11/07 20:05 Filed in: CD
The latest issue of The Absolute Sound
(December 2007) has a very interesting article
by Robert Harley titled: "Do hard-disk drives
sound better than CD?" This is a question we
have had many discussions about with our
customers.
It has been my belief for some time that a hard drive will be better for a number of reasons, mainly the accuracy with which a hard drive spins and retrieves data, is so much more accurate than a CD. But many would suggest that retrieving the data from the CD to put onto your hard drive will incur the same errors as reading directly from the CD, but this is not the case.
A computer reading data from a CD has the option of going over a section of the CD multiple times to ensure it retrieves the data, where a CD player playing a CD has one shot at it and uses error correction to fix any errors as best it can.
The other reason I have always believed a hard drive is a better storage format for audio is that 'jitter' is lower when retrieved from a hard drive than a CD.
In Robert Harley's article, he says: "The most likely explanation is that hard drives deliver a bitstream with greater timing precision (lower jitter). If the bits are the same, and the sound is different, the only thing left is jitter."
He goes on to test this theory by comparing a high-end Esoteric P-03 CD player with a music server, the result? "This suggests that jitter is, indeed, the explanation for why hard-disk drives sound better than optical discs."
In conclusion, he states: "We will increasingly listen to music from hard-disk drives; it’s good news that their advantages don’t come with a sonic penalty. Indeed, hard-disk drives actually deliver better sound than optical disc"
Vindication at last? Perhaps, it is certainly a step towards main stream music lovers accepting music servers as the main source of their listening pleasure, and further to that is another article in the same issue comparing some of the high end music server solutions, grab a copy if you can as it is a very good read.
It has been my belief for some time that a hard drive will be better for a number of reasons, mainly the accuracy with which a hard drive spins and retrieves data, is so much more accurate than a CD. But many would suggest that retrieving the data from the CD to put onto your hard drive will incur the same errors as reading directly from the CD, but this is not the case.
A computer reading data from a CD has the option of going over a section of the CD multiple times to ensure it retrieves the data, where a CD player playing a CD has one shot at it and uses error correction to fix any errors as best it can.
The other reason I have always believed a hard drive is a better storage format for audio is that 'jitter' is lower when retrieved from a hard drive than a CD.
In Robert Harley's article, he says: "The most likely explanation is that hard drives deliver a bitstream with greater timing precision (lower jitter). If the bits are the same, and the sound is different, the only thing left is jitter."
He goes on to test this theory by comparing a high-end Esoteric P-03 CD player with a music server, the result? "This suggests that jitter is, indeed, the explanation for why hard-disk drives sound better than optical discs."
In conclusion, he states: "We will increasingly listen to music from hard-disk drives; it’s good news that their advantages don’t come with a sonic penalty. Indeed, hard-disk drives actually deliver better sound than optical disc"
Vindication at last? Perhaps, it is certainly a step towards main stream music lovers accepting music servers as the main source of their listening pleasure, and further to that is another article in the same issue comparing some of the high end music server solutions, grab a copy if you can as it is a very good read.
|