Better than the results, though 
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Hi Jim,
No, I meant āhugeā (which might be overstating, I know) compared to the same system with TP-Link MC100CMās (which improved the same system slightly). And, no none of my Naim gear will accept add on PSUās - Iām referring to linear power supplies for the DC gear. And who knows? Could be with a lower noise floor you might find the optical Bridge to be even MORE obvious.
When we remodeled the living room, things got swapped around and my speakers ended up between a set of French doors, about 10ā apart from each other with the gear all to the left of one speaker. Tore my hair out how I was going to get NACA5 thought eh floor etc etc and then looked on my local dealers used list and lo and behold there was a 25ā pair of Rumor 2 for $175. Being nice and white and malleable, I was able to nicely run it around the white wood trim of the French doors and behind a large painting to the right speaker. Sounds fine to me, esp at that price!
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I have about 900 cds ripped to flac on the internal storage of the NUC, and the rest from Qobuz. The local files sound somewhat better, but streaming is really dang close.
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Nice work by your friend btw. This is probably one of my best known images FWIW. Different genres for sure. 
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Their official blurb is not much better. Thatās the quotes I posted. Saying that all IT switches donāt care about data integrity is just hilarious.
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Perhaps itās just me and I might be old fashioned but I think, looking at what you describe in your system, that I would be focusing more on hardware rather than cable.
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Now thatās rock and roll - literally.
(My life as a punk rock climber from age 16 was lived in the spirit of that photoā¦)
Sorry to divert thread.
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WAV is loads better than FLAC. And I include transcoded in that statement too.
Checked with my missus who has no idea what FLAC or WAV are and she picked WAV every single time.
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Yeahā¦ you are right to pull them up ā¦ but they do offer good solid productsā¦pseudo science needs debunkingā¦ they go over the top at timesā¦
Hi ā¦ I tried wav and was not convincedā¦strange. All the flacs I do are losslessā¦with no compression. Wav just seemed no betterā¦what system do you haveā¦
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That might be true if the Naim gear is doing the unpacking, but in my case itās the microRendu doing so. It is sending WAV via the Sonicorbiter app to my UQ though. Plus flags take up less space, and at the end of the day I just couldnāt bothered.
Well, one does need cables to get to the hardware after all. Plus, not all of us are able to go pop down $3-5k on a black box upgrade just because. This is a system Iāve built up over the last seven years and sounds way beyond the starting point. Plus, factoring in family room and WAF considerations, the half width Naim works best for me. Recently asked my Naim dealer about upgrading the 110 to a 100 because I felt I could use a bit more oomph (no room on the ārackā or wallet really for a full width amp) and he resoundingly said no, keep the 110. So there you have it.
It was ffmpeg on a QNAP doing the unpacking. I also tried V3 and V4 versions of ffmpeg on a RasPi with exactly the same results.
Memory and CPU usage on both devices was low.
Iād also previously compared FLAC/WAV on my Naim streamer and preferred WAV. So for a while I set Asset to transcode.
Itās in my profile. 
Well, I have a half dozen boxes of cds sitting in the basement that you are more than welcome to come over and re-rip. Pizza and beer on me. Not a chore I would ever want to do again. Iām fine with flac 5. Ignorance is bliss as they say.
Itās a free upgrade and dBPoweramp will convert it all. If you find no difference then you can convert it back again.
You could even do a small sample first.
You donāt need to rerip, this is what computers are for!
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Thatās interesting. I use Asset to transcode and cannot tell native WAV and the transcoded flac apart.
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so it will be cisco SFP > fiber optic > optical rendu ā¦
however, if i was you, but of course i am not, i would more upgrade the dac ( dac VI) before all this networking opimization: hdplex, uptone, optical renduā¦
If you have a single core CPU in both the NAS and the R Pi, then you may well find that FLAC transcoded to WAVE isnāt quite as good as WAVE played direct, even with low CPU usage.
(I donāt know about dual core NAS boxes, but with quad core CPUs they should be identical.)
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Both the NAS and Pi are 4-core CPUs. Running Linux ātopā showed CPU usage of around 8%.
Both CPUs are ARM ones.