I’ve got a Motivo and I’ve noticed it sounds better as a transport for Audirvana. This is a bit puzzling to me but I’m not the only one thinking this and there are much stranger things in the hifi world. Further testing gets me undecided if there is a difference between Audirvana pulling data from an external HDD with power source pluged to the Motivo or my second internal disk in the PC. If you put a pistol to my head, I would venture the PC has a very slight advantage.
This got me thinking if I couldn’t improve things further because it worries me the PC has still such a prevalent roll in my system, with all the noise inside, etc. Could a NAS be an improvement? Or a Sotm ethernet board? Any opinions based on experience on which is the best way to go about this? Or just leave it as it is?
BTW, the system isn’t super-duper revealing, it’s a Motivo to a Holo Cyan 2, to an Advance Paris A12 to a pair of Wharfedale Lintons.
1s, 0s … and different sort of jitter… (local storage, network storage, usb, network it self… etc)
My advice could be to test and report, but shorter path (internal storage) could be the best theoretically (since it work on the same clock)
In over 30 years of using digital files (and around 20 or so using networked storage devices of many kinds) I still have to find jitter or any other artifact/distortion being noticeable. With nowadays networks and devices, unless there’s a huge fault in the chain, this will not be a problem. Clocking and jitter correction devices are mostly snake oil (they do work, but their benefit is probably 0,00001% noticeable).
Jitter should be minimal with the NOS Cyan 2 but I’m sort of worried about noise from inside the PC. That and IIS connection to the DAC was the main reason for me to get a streamer. And it sounds better than PC into DAC through USB.
I’m trying to test PC HDD vs external HDD to the Motivo but I haven’t figured out yet how to do it. I haven’t heard a difference if I use Volumio as the player but things get better and more clear if I use Adirvana and the Motivo as a transport. If there are differences, that’s the set up that will more clearly show them. I haven’t figured out how Audirvana compiles its library if it finds the same album on both sources but it doesn’t duplicate them, so I think it only adds from source 2 what isn’t on 1 already. What I could probably do is put a test_track1 on one and test_track2 on the other (test tracks being the same track). I’ll try that tomorrow.