Reed
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Question regarding SSD for server
24x48
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There is no audio difference. Although if you have jitters when you do multi-tasking with other things, jitters may be reduced. If you want to improve sound quality, you should go for high-definition audio tracks and players.

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24x48 wrote:

There is no audio difference. Although if you have jitters when you do multi-tasking with other things, jitters may be reduced. If you want to improve sound quality, you should go for high-definition audio tracks and players.

 

So does that mean that high definition audio tracks and players do not have any jitter? And by the way, multi-tasking has nothing to do with jitter. Jitter in computer based audio playback is mostly the result of using USB in a non-asynchronous mode and besides it not audible to 99.999% of normal humans, on the other hand jitter is audible to 100% of the writers and editors at any high end audio magazine and by extension to all audiophiles.

24x48
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I am talking about big jitters. While playing audio, start MS Excel or Word. Then you will get big jitters. If you run multiple programs at the same time, they may fight for disk access and cpu usage which will have negative sound effects!

Of course, high definition tracks will likely to be more severely affected as they demand more disk access and cpu usage.

Bill B
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What you are talking about is not actually jitter. It may be a colorful word you like  to use to describe other phenomena, such as CPU usage interfering with playback, but that is not jitter. 

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Bill B wrote:

What you are talking about is not actually jitter. It may be a colorful word you like  to use to describe other phenomena, such as CPU usage interfering with playback, but that is not jitter. 

Exactly

24x48
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Look, words have many meanings. I was using it in a broad generic sense, not in a strictly technical sense in some fields. Unless you suggest better words, I will insist using it!

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Since jitter has a very specific, established, and significant meaning in digital design and performance (look it up in Wikipedia), you would cause yourself to be misunderstood (at best) if you use a known term but apply only your own private meaning to it. That would be like using the term "harmonic distortion" here, but claiming it means poor mouth harp technique. 

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Jitter is a word in English dictionary! It's best if you use words in that sense. Most people here are not electronic engineers. They will understand from that sense.

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Yes, you used, incorrectly, a word that exists in a dictionary. Since you have posted in this forum to give advice to others on digital file playback, you should learn what "jitter" means in precisely that context.  

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To the OP, as far as I know, a SSD would not improve the audio in that scenario, since as you note it will have already been pulled of the storage device. 

24x48
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According to your Wekipedia,"Jitter is the 'undesired deviation from true periodicity' of an assumed periodic signal in electronics and telecommunications". I used based on this context of "undesired deviation from true periodicity"! From the same context, We can use the word for many different thinngs. I don't find any suitable word to describe audio distortions caused by CPU and disk drive contentions, than jitters.
 

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Use "stutter" for that problem, since jitter is not the right term for what u described. 

Reed
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Thought I would update on some findings.

I purchased a new MacBook Pro with an SSD hard drive.  Using the same software and the same files copied from the Mac mini, I notice a quite noticeable improvement through the MacBook Pro.  Admittedly, the setup is somewhat different.  The MacBook Pro is running from battery power vs. wall power, the music is on the laptop vs an external firewire drive, the hardware on the MacBook Pro is newer (mini is the -1 version) and the hard drive is SSD.  My guess is that more than one of these factors is contributing improvements to some extent.

I didn't have a thunderbolt to firewire adapter, so I couldn't try the same drive though the new computer.  I'm out of town this week, so I want to try that this weekend.  Additionally, I want to plug the laptop in and see if that has an effect.  I'm also going to try loading the same files onto the Mini hard drive as well....so many variables.....

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After loading viodeo/audio files into hard disk, I normally do defragmentation. Some files seem to made of tens of thousands files. I don't know how defragmentation will affect the life of SSD as it has finite write cycles. At the moment, SSD-based computers are avoids for me because of this problem. Last time, I hit the limit with USB flash drive. So I am very wary about SSD.

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