[datman]

Today I had a strange experience.  I decided to upgrade the connection between my Western Digital My Book external hard drive (my music server) from Firewire 400 to Firewire 800.  I did the full upgrade.  New i/o card and full 9 wire connecting cable.  The difference in sound quality is amazing.  Where the bass had been somewhat reticent it now presents itself fully and  in correct proportion.  Highs which had been harsh have smoothed completely and no longer grate.  This is not because of rolloff, they just sound right.  It is as if there is simply more information than before. 

I had always been under the impression that firewire 400/usb 2.0  could pass more information than a music data stream would create.  Apparently, this is not completely true.  The difference is so great I simply cannot ascribe it to wishful thinking.  Can someone confirm this or at least tell me why this would be the case. 

By the way, I upgraded so I could move large amounts of data from my WD drives to a NAS at gigabit speeds.

[jqp]

I am not familiar with all the issues of Squeezbox-audio or streaming audio in general.

However, for USB and firewire there is connectivity, drivers, CPU activity and USB polling to consider. That is you are probably not getting 400 from firewire 400, and definitely not 480 from USB 2.0 Theoretically firewire offloads the CPU activity to the firewire card, but I am sure drivers could get scewed up. I am not a fan of USB because of the choices they made when designing the protocols - probably mostly academic these days, in the old days you couldn't even burn a CD half the time over USB.

1. DAS (direct access storage) which you seem to be doing, will greatly outperform NAS (network attached storage). Audio and Video streaming should be done from DAS. Was the firewire 800 drive direct attached to your PC, and was the previous drive in the same configuration. (It seems clear but want to clarify)

2. It may be a case of better cable, card interface connectivity, or a better PCI bus interface (HW and or SW) with the firewire 800 setup.

3. As an aside, wireless A/V is probably not ready for prime time and would require a really good wireless router with matching wireless cards, and definitely not the Linksys WRT54G v5  http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/content/view/26843/51/   (I personnaly just got the D-Link DIR-655, relatively expensive like the new draftN routers but got it for $109 at circuit city - I think today is the last day before it goes back to $149! But again I am not going to do wireless A?V at this point))