Hello,
I just curious how many gigs the RAM that uses in ND555
do bigger RAM result better fast response in change any application in streamer device, for instance if we use streaming radio and we dont shut down/pause the radio and then we open another application, for instance Roon/Spotify, etc, do bigger RAM will make multitasking activity like above smoother ?
I don’t know exactly which RAM you mean, I guess for the system. For audio buffering, the size is 50MB.
I don’t think there is any difference of system RAM size in the various streamers because the streaming board is the same.
With the NDX2, I am not experiencing any lag when switching between radio, Roon, etc., so I don’t see a need to improve anything compared to this. Are you experiencing lag when switching between tasks?
Be aware that filling the 50MB audio buffer can take a bit of time before radio or streaming with the Naim app starts. Depends on internet speed, but should normally not be longer than a few seconds
Memory on the card has been increased to 512MB of DDR3 RAM (16 times the 32MB on Naim’s previous streaming card), 50MB of which is allocated to the audio buffer allowing the NP800 to store almost 5 minutes of a 44.1kHz/16-bit stereo audio signal.
As @james_n kindly wrote. Note that the streamers are not general-purpose computers, they are embedded systems with strictly defined purposes, and which code they run is known in advance. They don’t have to load large programming libraries or data sets when you start unknown applications, they don’t have to allocate memory on the fly for unexpected tasks, and they don’t have to display a graphical UI. You don’t need lots of RAM for what they do, just enough for the predefined purposes and code. (Anything more would simply be unused)
The buffer size is interesting, being quite small when memory is relatively so cheap (and was when ND555 was designed). My understanding is that Audirvana on my Mac Mini loads each complete track into RAM before playing - even if the track is an hour long and high def (though 24/384 would have to load more data if longer than maybe 50 minutes or so - but such tracks I think are very rare!) The idea is to avoid unnecessary activity as much as possible whilst playing.
I just curious how many GB of computing device of ND555, as we can make similarity as Raspberry Pi on ND555, if suing Pi 4B for instance, there’s choice of 1,2,4,and 8GB of RAM