ericgriffin

In the case of playing an audio file, the digital data (audio or not - it's all the same) moves (losslessly!) from the hard drive (or nas/f.c. san/whatever - it doesn't matter) over the pci bus, through cpu registers and into ram. Then from ram (it will probably have some other things done to it like decoding or processing by software at this point in which case it'll pass through cpu registers many times again) through the cpu registers again and back onto the pci bus, where it will land on either the usb/firewire/whatever controller or your pci audio card's memory/buffer. The time domain is not a factor all the way up through this point. If you think particular storage is giving you "better highs" or whatever then I'd return it immediately. That storage must be magically mangling bits and you definitely wouldn't be able to boot an operating system from it. Thinking the storage type makes a difference in sound is like me saying saying that my car drives better because the gas pump I use pumps gas faster...