Hi, it was the Bridgeco streaming boards in Naim’s 1st gen streamers that were limited in their ability to handle remote servers due to their added latency issues. This quote from Naim’s Software Director, Steve Harris, I think is a good example. Hopefully @Stevesky won’t mind me quoting him here).
“……the network stack in the bridgeco really can’t handle it. The main limitation is that the network peripheral in the chip only has 8K of fast DMA memory (which equates to 6K of real data). This means when streaming high bandwidth data (eg. JB Radio 2 - 4Mbits/sec) you can’t do enough 6K’s in a sec to reach 4Mbits/sec.
aka:
4000 / (6 x 8 ) = 83 transactions a second. or network needs a ping time to server of <12ms to achieve this 83 figure. Not going to happen as physical speed of light says we’re not going from Europe to Canada and back again in <12ms.
The only solution is to proxy it via a UPnP server that is running on hardware that can expose a nice big TCP window and hence nice big chunks of data can flow from the radio server, then the 83 transactions a second are on a LAN link of <1ms ping times.
On the newer products the network stack exposes (and can handle) a huge TCP window + we have a massive input buffer, so streaming from the other side of the world + reasonably high bandwidths can be handled.”