NAS versus PC - any sound quality difference?

[garym]

and regarding readynas (or almost any NAS), as has been pointed out, even when marketed as "very quiet", they are not at all the sort of thing you want to have in the listening room with you (i.e., they are quieter than your lawn mower, but NOT silent). But of course that's the beauty of the SB approach. The server is in some back cabinet, basement, garage, etc. connected via ethernet to your router. Your SB player is next to your stereo, connected via ethernet or wifi.

[Mnyb]

As I said - I am no computer engineer, but my statement was regarding timing in the digital domain in general, not certain parts of the digital domain.

Thanks to both of you guys for your quick replies.

Do you think a ReadyNAS Ultra 2 RNDU2000 will do a good job?
As I understand, the NAS should preferably be x86 compatible ...

The ultra seems a popular choice .

Competitors would be vortexbox, HP proliant microserver .

A shuttle or other barebones small PC, some higher end Synology modell .

There are a bunch of plug computers and ARM based devices that are popular , if one will sacrifice some performance for the powersaving and can live without transcoding options .

x86 or some of the latest arm devices .

I think gary had the old ReadyNAS duo ,wich was very slow and had very little ram :-/


As I understand a NAS is more expensive than a barebones diy /vortexbox /microserver but offers other pre-installed features if you like som of the other features that a NAS vendor offers this may be your choice .
If it's only for the squeezeboxserver you can get more bang for the buck elsewhere .

[garym]

The ultra seems a popular choice .

Competitors would be vortexbox, HP proliant microserver .

A shuttle or other barebones small PC, some higher end Synology modell .

There are a bunch of plug computers and ARM based devices that are popular , if one will sacrifice some performance for the powersaving and can live without transcoding options .

x86 or some of the latest arm devices .

I think gary had the old ReadyNAS duo ,wich was very slow and had very little ram :-/


As I understand a NAS is more expensive than a barebones diy /vortexbox /microserver but offers other pre-installed features if you like som of the other features that a NAS vendor offers this may be your choice .
If it's only for the squeezeboxserver you can get more bang for the buck elsewhere .

yep, I had the old readynas duo. My understanding is that the new version is much better/faster. Mnyb makes a critical point for you. If the reason for the NAS is only serving music to the SB, you don't need the extra expense of the NAS and its extra stuff. This said, I can do lots of "NAS" type stuff with my Vortexbox Appliance. That is, it holds my music, runs LMS to serve the music, but I can also store any sort of files there that I can transfer to/from other computers on my local network (so I keep all my backup photos, word, excel, etc. files there). The vortexbox drives are mapped to a "letter" drive on my laptop and I can move files around just like they are on a local harddrive of my laptop. The vortexbox also has the ability to run programs that can deal with serving video files to networked video players (Boxee, etc.). People report good results with using Windows Home Server software on a "headless" computer as well.

[jp73]

If you get a nas then get a fast one. Reason is that they are such great devices that you will start using them for other things as well.

I got a synology 1511+ which is based on a 1,8 Ghz atom processor and I used it (as a test) to simultaneously stream different songs to 3 Squeezebox Boom's 1 Squeezebox classic and one squeezebox transporter. They were playing flac's and mp3's.
In the mean time I was streaming a video_TS file to a popcorn hour media player and it was downloading at full speed using Sabnzbd.
No issues at all. :-)

Synology provides a standard package for Squeezebox server. Just click and install, no hassle.

[darrell]

I don't know that I have a high-end system, more "mid-end" by some people's standards - Cambridge Audio 840C CD/DAC, Naim Nait XS and Dynaudio Contour 1.3mk2. There is no difference in sound quality between using a ReadyNAS Sparc-based NAS, an atom-based mini-pc or an Intel Core-i5 laptop. As others have explained above, all are capable of delivering the TCP-IP data packets to the SB Touch, subject only to a reliable network connection.

Having said that, now I only use the ReadyNAS as storage, and run the server on my mini-pc, simply to speed up the UI and libary scans, and allow the possibility of real-time transcoding of flac to mp3 to make my collection available over the internet. The Atom-based mini-pc is more than capable of these tasks, as well as running XBMC connected to an HD TV.

If you do go down the NAS route, get a powerful one, for the reasons others have given above, but not to improve sound quality, as it won't make any difference. If I were starting from scratch, I'd get the mini-pc and a large USB disk, and forget about the NAS.

[aubuti]

If I were starting from scratch, I'd get the mini-pc and a large USB disk, and forget about the NAS.

I agree completely. You can get a lot more processing power per dollar (or pound or euro) with a small form factor pc than with a NAS. The pc also tends to be more flexible when it comes to choosing OS, changing hardware, etc. In addition, you often get better power management with a pc, so that even if the pc draws more watts than the NAS (and that is an _if_ because some NASs are power hungry), the total power consumption can be less by using suspend/hibernate/shutdown and wake-on-LAN.

[kiat]

I've done a comparison of LMS on the following

1) ReadyNas Duo - LMS 7.7.x, RAM 1GB
2) Dell Latitude E6420, Win7, 8GB (network drive to ReadyNas Duo)

Squeezebox touch with TT3.0 installed all running on wired network

I find the Squeezebox sounds better with LMS running on Duo. Sounds clean and more dynamic

[aubuti]

As I said - I am no computer engineer, but my statement was regarding timing in the digital domain in general, not certain parts of the digital domain.

Then I really don't understand why you specified a certain part of the digital domain, i.e., "From my point of view a difference (if any) regarding jitter using a NAS vs. a PC would be that the CPU speed and perhaps RAM speed of the PC is higher and thus timing of the data stream could be more precise."

Jitter downstream exists, though whether it is audible to humans (using modern equipment) is a matter of debate.

[Soulkeeper]

I find the Squeezebox sounds better with LMS running on Duo. Sounds clean and more dynamic

Good for you. Probably completely irrelevant for everybody else.

[garym]

I find the Squeezebox sounds better with LMS running on Duo. Sounds clean and more dynamic

how many trials in your test, and was it single-blind or double-blind?