Is the NAS dead for audio?

Thanks Chris. I’ve installed bubble server on my NAS and am using The Lumin app to navigate Tidal. First impression, not sure If I’m hearing much of a difference… will need to have a few listening sessions to decided. :grin:

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I found it best to use a separate device to host Bubble Server. I tried it on my NAS and it wasn’t a patch on running it on an old laptop.
Once I was happy I set up a RasPi and never looked back.

That’s interesting b/c I heard an immediate improvement to native Tidal streaming.

I’ve seen reference to that here but I don’t know what it is or does. :smiley:

There was always Compuserve.

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Gosh - that brings back memories. Anyone here use(d) CIX?

Yes I did… one used xmodem or zmodem access protocols over serial link dial up… effectively into a bulletin board… what we would now call a forum… Cix also offered an email service and access to the internet UUNET service… yes the world before tcp/ip access and the World Wide Web.
The other biggies were AOL and CompuServe… I seem to remember… whilst CIX was I think specifically UK centric… AOL was a sort of Facebook of the late 80s early 90s mass targeted to consumers with a computer

A dedicated audio ripper/nas/server - as opposed to a general purpose ICT nas.
Details depending on which model In the range.

The NAS is alive and well in sits one floor below my music rack and contains a couple thousand albums. It is so much easier then handling CD’s. Ripping the initial load of CD’s was handled over several weeks and now they get ripped when they arrive or within a day or two.

I only use TIDAL for online service and that has been off-line a few times over the past couple of years, the NAS has been up 7x24 during this time except a couple of times when the neighborhood lost power during a storm.

So for the time being the ‘NAS’ is not Dead for Audio…

JMHO - YMMV

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I never needed a NAS in the very first place. A Raspberry Pi and an attached USB drive is all you need: in case of failure they can be replaced in a few minutes and there is no need to faff around with web interfaces and poor documentation!

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You mean you use a home-made NAS!

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Quite…

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That is a NAS, in effect.

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I was thinking the same… 9.6K!! Luxury :wink:

Our company started using a 1200/75 baud modem. It took so long trying to download the browser that the link would die before it got more than 15mins into it. So the browser was sent out on a floppy disc by the isp.

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I stared in Datacomms in 1984 as a network manager, with corporate networks having 110bd and 300bd access, into 9.6k and data centre links. When we upgraded in the early ‘90s to a network with 64K host lines we called it High Speed Data Network.

Another ‘on the to’ list for me - we have several RPis lying around…

For a non physical NAS solution one can upload music files to the OneDrive cloud storage. Music can be streamed directly from it with the MusicPlayer app.

This is a low cost solution if you already have a OneDrive account.

I have almost 3TB music…on OneDrive this is very expensive…

It was a luxury, the annual rental was hugely expensive for an X.25 packet switched network link (PSS) I think into JANET (though could be wrong, it was a long time ago), and I seem to remember one payed per byte of data as well or similar . … before general ISPs and long before the WWW first appeared.

So why does a good NAS tend to sound better than streaming from Qobuz or Tidal?

Presumably not because the data stream is different because that is checked?

Going from Tidal’s server to your router the data file’s split into millions of data packets that are reassembled in the streamer.

Something similar happens if the file only goes from your Melco or Qnap to your streamer (perhaps via a switch) - but the chain of events and timescales are much shorter in the local NAS case.

So why does the NAS tend to sound better?

Is it because the longer jounrney allows the packets to get split up and they arrive in a more jumbled order so more processing is done to put the file back together?

And will this difference be eradicated as web streaming improves?

Are there any SQ benefits to be had from using a USB attached NAS versus a upnp attached NAS? The upnp input seems to be much better for SQ in my experience.