There is nothing intrinsic to the hardware that will make music sound better because you use ssd or traditional drives. At a software level the data in the music file is passed to the streamer asynchronously and bit perfect with any transmission errors leading to a resend. Errors in the chain ultimately may cause a gap in music playback but never a degradation of sound quality.
Any impact on the sound is secondary - electromagnetic interference / noise from the device caused by issues like faulty power supply, noisy components, component workload etc. impacting the streamer via ethernet cables or power cables/common earth.
Switches generally do a good job of filtering this noise out especially if the switches are connected with unshielded twisted pair cable. So just put your NAS on a different switch and donāt worry about its impact on the sound of your streamer.
Iāve got two NAS running in the house both on different switches and not in the same room as the hifi due to the audible noise generated by the spinning disks. And a music server connected via wifi. If that noise bothers you use ssds.
On the first generation Naim streamer the inter frame timing from the Upnp server/NAS operating system did affect sound in the streamers. I could find this deterministically so. At the time I took several timing traces and shared with Naim engineering whilst the second gen streamers were in development. In short Naim changed the architecture for the second gen and subsequent streamers to remove this affect from the system. Now the media data via an http transfer is loaded into memory as fast as possible and played from the local streamer memory, as opposed to spooling realtime across the ethernet. Also increased decoupling between the network module and the digital streaming board has been increased.
So now if you could hear these differences, it would vary through a track.
I suspect you are far more likely to hear the analogue interference effects of common mode currents grounding through the streamer through poorly earthed home network equipment. Non earthed switches should be avoided like the plague for good low noise hygiene.
Thanks for sharing. I had a Uniti 2, which I presume would have been on the prior setup. Current stream is ND555 which is ethernet wired to a switch in my living room which is shared with my TV and the NUC that runs the Roon Server. Your post reminds me that I want to run a back to back comparo of the same tune played from Tidal via Roon, Played from Roonās database from a rip and played on the CDT9000. I did something similar with Led Zeppelin Physical Graffiti when I had the Uniti and an RP3 turntable. I couldnāt tell the difference then between a streamed file and the CD back then. Although the Vinyl did sound different. Iāll re-do the test at some point and probably will ad Vinyl into the mix, will make it a weekend thing with some friends
As always interesting. Though history now presumably given modern streamer designs are fully asynchronous.
Out of historical interest it was presumably the upnp software that created the timing issues not the NAS operating system per se - presumably due to load?
No it was the Operating System, not the application itself. After all the application is simply undertaking an http transfer.
The TCP/IP stack which controls the TCP session management and inter frame timing consistency is all governed by the OS interworking with its hardware drivers.
So for example Asset UPnP could sound quite different on different servers/OS.
As far as streamer spooling, it was always asynchronous, it was the spooling strategies and spool buffer memory sizing that were optimized with different designs, and they differ still today with products across manufacturers.
The other consideration, although not relevant for home streaming, is that cloud streaming is all encrypted and modern chipsets are more efficient and speedier and encrypting and decrypting the https flows. Lower latency in the network stack means less chance of a flow reset, or stalled or interrupted playouts.
It should nt be an issue ā¦ but across makes and manufacturers the decoupling and electrical separation between the network protocol stack and the digital streaming board is important and will vary. This is typically more where you get what you pay for ā¦ and we know how Naim do it.
A single small board with closely coupled VLSI chips is going to struggle to excel hereā¦ although it will be cheaper to manufacturer
Yep. Any asynchronous system can exhibit some of the characteristics of a synchronous system due to poor physical implementation or issues - resource contention or bottlenecks , IO and CPU saturation, insufficient parallelism, lower level serialisation etc.
For example I am able to generate / observe issues with playback when there is ultra heavy load on my NAS or music server or very occasionally when there are issues with qobuz servers. But this is typically manifested as cutouts with a linn streamer. Sound quality does not fluctuate like a yoyo.
To answer the earlier question again no need to lose sleep over the fact that you have traditional disk drives in a synology NAS versus SSD. Both components have sufficient throughput not to upset the applecart.
I found the audiophile silicon SSDās sounded better than the regular ones which muddy the music with digital harshness and their superior engineering delivered richer bass, silkier highs, and a more holographic soundstage. Their gold-plated NAND cells and oxygen-free firmware ensure that every file transfer is as smooth as a vinyl groove, letting you finally hear the subtle nuances in your FLAC filesālike the gentle sigh of the mastering engineer. Once you experience the sonic purity of audio grade storage, youāll never go back to those pedestrian, non-audiophile drives again.
Not one iota of difference on my setup whether I use traditional discs or SSDs or flash .. no flapping veils or such likeā¦ never did and still doesnāt.. which of course is what I would expect.
I also hear no difference from the more likely RAID type.
