jaybee wrote:So I was reading the audioquest guide to CA, and while the suggestion of carrying the audio out and storage access on different connection hubs (one usb one firewire) makes sense, it raises a question?
Is the suggestion that you get higher performance by using external hard drives instead of your laptops internal one?
I think its important that the drive and the dac are on different busses - gives a more straight forward throughput in the computer with less data packet clashes and possible delay associated with bus sharing - one cause of jitter in the system. Most decent players (Amarra, Audirvana etc.) will load the track or album into ram before playing, so the performance of the HD may not be important to the sound quality but may effect load time.
You can check on the bus configuration using the system profiler on the mac and move the dac to another port if necessary.
Also, if your library is on a separate drive, making a clone or backup is a very simple matter. I keep 3 copies of my 30,000+ song library as I could not face into ripping/downloading everything again.
I am using a headless mac mini with a 2 Tb external firewire 800 drive (Iomega) as a source. The mini is configured using screen sharing and once set up is controlled from iPad or iPhone using the remote app. This is a very convenient and elegant solution for me and I'm delighted with the sound - zero fiddling about and maximum music listening.
Mark.
