Has anyone compared Thunderbolt, Firewire and USB interfaces for Sound Quality ? .......

joeinid

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Just curious if you've compared them and noticed sound differences. I guess I should add CAT 5/6 network interfaces as well.
 
Thunderbolt has additional electronics at the plug ends for communication and housekeeping and wonder what the effect would be on music.
 
So how would a Thunderbolt system be configured? A Mac serving digits over Thunderbolt into a Thunderbolt media player? Are there Thunderbolt players out there?

I think the Weiss Man media player supports Firewire FWIW.
 
USB is a shared bus, so every USB device you connect adds to the processing overhead of your computer. If you use an external storage device, it's best to use something other than USB (e.g. FireWire or Thunderbolt) and leave only your DAC on USB.

Thunderbolt is a subset of the PCI-E spec, so it has the same potential performance as your internal hard drive. I use a thunderbolt HDD for music storage and it's great.
 
NAS is another good way to have, no conflicting between DAC and Hard drive trying to sharing the USB port. Just make sure you have Gigabit network.
I know Mytek DAC sound little better with Firewire though.
 
Right now, I run a Mac Mini which is connected via USB to my DAC. I've tried playing my files off the internal hard drive, an external WD Firewire drive, and an external WD Thunderbolt drive. All 3 sound different, even though I use the memory play function of Pure Music. Go figure ! I liked the Firewire drive the best.

I also briefly compared this with a spare Mac Mini I bought second hand. That was better in every way on paper (faster CPU, 16 GB RAM vs 8 on mine, SSD drive). I didn't like the way it sounded. But to be fair, the previous owner was quite messy with his software, lots of redundant programs, a dual boot partition etc.


When I was using a Squeezebox to stream music, I wired it directly using Cat 5 ethernet to the router. There was distinct difference between two of the ethernet cables I had on hand.
 
Just curious if you've compared them and noticed sound differences. I guess I should add CAT 5/6 network interfaces as well.

Heres a video of Steve Silberman from the 2012 RMAF explaining some basics of computer setup, and goes into the different port formats. I found it helpful as I'm about to take my first steps into the computer audio. Granted its over a year old … I think that equates to seven computer year. :snicker:

https://audiofest.net/new/videos/computer-audio-from-the-pc-to-your-home-stereo/
 
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