Solid Snake-Oil Storage: This SSD Is Aimed at Audiophiles

[OM_2K19]

What started as a debate on storage medium/technology become digital vs. analog
For 2-ch music playback, a simple spinner HDD or even a flash drive is sufficient. SSD may be overkill for audio.
And USB 2.0 is fast enough for data transfer too.
Cheers,
Raghu

The goal post moved a long time ago... But still a pretty informative discussion...

The problem with Streaming is that they tend to employ variable bit rates as per network conditions. Even though it's advertised as Hi-Res but chances are there that the streams fall back to AAC in between, especially at the start of the stream. If you download a track (raw FLAC) from any popular streaming service and then play it locally, you will notice a difference compared to when streamed online.

 

[superczar]

The problem with Streaming is that they tend to employ variable bit rates as per network conditions. Even though it's advertised as Hi-Res but chances are there that the streams fall back to AAC in between, especially at the start of the stream. If you download a track (raw FLAC) from any popular streaming service and then play it locally, you will notice a difference compared to when streamed online.

Was true in the low bandwidth Internet connection days.

You need really low bandwidth (by current standards) to stream lossless audio.
A typical good quality home network in 2021 will have over 20x-40x headroom over what’s required for zero lag lossless audio streaming

 

[alpha1]

I want to listen to how "jitter" sounds - any examples?

 

[mbhangui]

I want to listen to how "jitter" sounds - any examples?

This is how jitter (the band) sounds

EDIT:
Jitter doesn't have it's own sound like what happens with problems that plague analog. Jitter affects the orignal sound when it is played back. People say most new dacs don't have a problem with jitter. But truly very little study has gone into this.

"Getting rid of Jitter is like getting a new "perfect fit" pair of eyeglasses. You always thought you could see quite well, and you certainly never lost your way going home from work. But suddenly, you are surprised!"

 

[OM_2K19]

A typical good quality home network in 2021 will have over 20x-40x headroom over what’s required for zero lag lossless audio streaming

This was my understanding too, but after talking to an insider looks like it's not the case. At the start of the streaming, it monitors the network for a good one minute before elevating the service to FLAC/Hi-Res bit rate in case of a high-speed network. They also check the network for the whole streaming session (this shouldn't affect Broadband but Wireless/4G) and adjust the bit rate accordingly. But in any case, the initial few mins of streaming are not at FLAC/Hi-Res bit rate.

 

[superczar]

This was my understanding too, but after talking to an insider looks like it's not the case. At the start of the streaming, it monitors the network for a good one minute before elevating the service to FLAC/Hi-Res bit rate in case of a high-speed network. They also check the network for the whole streaming session (this shouldn't affect Broadband but Wireless/4G) and adjust the bit rate accordingly. But in any case, the initial few mins of streaming are not at FLAC/Hi-Res bit rate.

you can enable streaming stats on your player to see what the real time exact codec / file type and bit rate are for a stream.
This is something you can test for yourself rather than taking someone's word for it.

The flipping usually takes about a couple for seconds for 2160p HDR video streams (20-40mbps ) and near instantaneous for audio

 

[OM_2K19]

This is something you can test for yourself rather than taking someone's word for it.

Done it via network trace... The flip happened anywhere between 30-60 seconds...

 

[mbhangui]

This was my understanding too, but after talking to an insider looks like it's not the case. At the start of the streaming, it monitors the network for a good one minute before elevating the service to FLAC/Hi-Res bit rate in case of a high-speed network. They also check the network for the whole streaming session (this shouldn't affect Broadband but Wireless/4G) and adjust the bit rate accordingly. But in any case, the initial few mins of streaming are not at FLAC/Hi-Res bit rate.

You can check your interface. To avoid surprises I always use a wired 1Gpbs lan connection to the router. Here is the output of iftop, where it can be seen that my device is consuming peak of 4 Mbps for playing a flac with sample rate of 44.1 kHz. 4 Mbps is well below the speed that the interface supports. In fact when I do a scp of a large file I easily get a transfer rate of 1 Gbps (around 120 Mega Bytes per second).

Below, usbridge is the host on which I have my DAC connected. MusicPI is a RPI4 device to which I have attached a 4 Tb drive and configured nfs-server to serve the entire music directory. The usbridge mounts it using autofs and when I play any music it is served via NFS.

 

[reignofchaos]

If packets are getting lost or data is not arriving, you can check what is going on in real time with Wireshark. I worked for a long time in Wireless VR rendering where the average bitrates were in the range of 300-400 mbps and wireshark was our friend. We saw packet losses only when the interfaces heated up after hours of use.

In comparison to those bitrates, audio transmission bitrates are a complete joke! You will probably never lose a packet if your wireless is configured properly. With wired, you will *never* lose a packet within your home network unless you use garbage equipment.

 

[mbhangui]

In comparison to those bitrates, audio transmission bitrates are a complete joke! You will probably never lose a packet if your wireless is configured properly. With wired, you will *never* lose a packet within your home network unless you use garbage equipment.

Yes, with wired you will never lose a packet within the lan. Wireless has too many issues, the prominent being buggy wlan drivers. Most of the time the manufacturers just copy existing code for a new piece of hardware. The amount of bloat in wlan drivers should be seen to be believed. Earlier I used to spend good amount of time to fix broadcom drivers whenever fedora came with a new release. It is just not worth it. I have stopped using the onboard wifi and use something that works well with linux. On the raspberry PI for music playback I just don't let a wifi dongle near any of the usb ports

 

[reignofchaos]

Yes, with wired you will never lose a packet within the lan. Wireless has too many issues, the prominent being buggy wlan drivers. Most of the time the manufacturers just copy existing code for a new piece of hardware. The amount of bloat in wlan drivers should be seen to be believed. Earlier I used to spend good amount of time to fix broadcom drivers whenever fedora came with a new release. It is just not worth it. I have stopped using the onboard wifi and use something that works well with linux. On the raspberry PI for music playback I just don't let a wifi dongle near any of the usb ports

Buy intel based wifi. Broadcom and realtek lan is garbage.

 

[Enkay78]

This thread is beginning to look like a fight for perspectives and perception.

 

[prem]

Arj, I am surprised that you have not heard music coming from behind you. My kids are usually playing their own music in their bedroom when I am listening to my system. I guess your kids are more disciplined

 

[sidvee]

Going back to the OP discussion, I have one question, are SSD's more reliable than HDD? I have to make a decision soon on a 1tb SATA ssd drive and was wondering about this. I had a few external HDD's crash sometimes but don't have much experience with SSD. I currently have 2 SSD's that are working very well. And additionally if SSD's are more reliable then do I have to spend more for the samsung version rather than the cheaper crucial?
Cheers,
Sid

 

[mbhangui]

It is 2021 now and this is the result of j-test for jitter in sync mode. The DAC uses ess9038
View attachment 65688

Going back to the OP discussion, I have one question, are SSD's more reliable than HDD? I have to make a decision soon on a 1tb SATA ssd drive and was wondering about this. I had a few external HDD's crash sometimes but don't have much experience with SSD. I currently have 2 SSD's that are working very well. And additionally if SSD's are more reliable then do I have to spend more for the samsung version rather than the cheaper crucial?
Cheers,
Sid

SSDs have limited writes, after which the cells cannot be used. The controller intelligently migrates the data to lesser used cells using a process called "wear levelling". So you don't lose data. So far I have had two of my employee macbook pro ssd crashing. The macbooks were heavily used for photoshop. So I would take manufacturers claims about ssd lasting for 100s of years with a pinch of salt. But my own ssd boot disk at home is going strong for 5+ years now.

The life span of an SSD – how long does it last and what can be done to take care?

EDIT: This is the samsung disk that I have which is going strong for more than 5+ years now

https://www.amazon.in/gp/product/B079DTMNWC/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1

 

[firearm12]

Going back to the OP discussion, I have one question, are SSD's more reliable than HDD? I have to make a decision soon on a 1tb SATA ssd drive and was wondering about this. I had a few external HDD's crash sometimes but don't have much experience with SSD. I currently have 2 SSD's that are working very well. And additionally if SSD's are more reliable then do I have to spend more for the samsung version rather than the cheaper crucial?
Cheers,
Sid

I have had ssd failures as well as hdd failures. Both are not 100% reliable. If one wants enterprise level reliability, using raid configuration with multiple hdds is best option. If raid is not an option it's best to keep data backed up.

 

[superczar]

Going back to the OP discussion, I have one question, are SSD's more reliable than HDD? I have to make a decision soon on a 1tb SATA ssd drive and was wondering about this. I had a few external HDD's crash sometimes but don't have much experience with SSD. I currently have 2 SSD's that are working very well. And additionally if SSD's are more reliable then do I have to spend more for the samsung version rather than the cheaper crucial?
Cheers,
Sid

TL;DR - If the drive is meant purely for music storage, any decent SSD will be a whole lot more reliable than a spin drive.

SSD failure stories (barring rare exceptions) are largely on account of low grade SSDs with low write endurance being used for scenarios that involved excessive levels of writing - Of the order of Multiple Terabytes a day

Music storage and playback alone will contribute a really low level of writes - so little in fact that you wouldn't wear out the memory cells practically ever

 

[arj]

Going back to the OP discussion, I have one question, are SSD's more reliable than HDD? I have to make a decision soon on a 1tb SATA ssd drive and was wondering about this. I had a few external HDD's crash sometimes but don't have much experience with SSD. I currently have 2 SSD's that are working very well. And additionally if SSD's are more reliable then do I have to spend more for the samsung version rather than the cheaper crucial?
Cheers,
Sid

If it is a boot able disk then the boot time of an SSD is incredible. my 10 year old iMac just got on boosters. but if you have the budget, go SSD !

As mentioned above, If it is data reliabity then you can get a RAID setup with HDD's..

 

[Sean de Silva]

TL;DR - If the drive is meant purely for music storage, any decent SSD will be a whole lot more reliable than a spin drive.

SSD failure stories (barring rare exceptions) are largely on account of low grade SSDs with low write endurance being used for scenarios that involved excessive levels of writing - Of the order of Multiple Terabytes a day

Music storage and playback alone will contribute a really low level of writes - so little in fact that you wouldn't wear out the memory cells practically ever

Could you kindly recommend or share links online for SSD portable. I would be using strictly for music connecting to allo boss 2. I'm currently using a WD 1.5TB portable HDD.

 

[firearm12]

Could you kindly recommend or share links online for SSD portable. I would be using strictly for music connecting to allo boss 2. I'm currently using a WD 1.5TB portable HDD.

Any reason for looking to get ssd instead of hdd? I hope you are not inspired by better audio quality of ssd.