I’m a happy owner of a SuperUniti. My system is configured that way: Superuniti connected to a switch and the switch goes to my Synology NAS (DS216j) and to the router. This is a standard configuration; everything works well, and the sound is great. I’m using Minimserver on my NAS.
I wanted to experiment with a new configuration: My Superuniti would be connected directly to the NAS (with one Ethernet cable) and I would install a wifi antenna on my NAS to make it visible on the network. That way I would get rid of the switch and (possibly) improve the sound of my system.
I tried and it didn’t work. With the Wifi antenna installed (Asus USB-AC56), the NAS is visible on my home network but the Superuniti is not. The Superuniti “sees” the NAS and I can access my music but only by using the front panel. Since the Superuniti is not visible on my home network I can’t use the Naim app on my iPad to control my music. That’s a big issue.
I’ve looked at the different Network settings on the Synology’s DSM config panel but I didn’t find anything that could make that work. I know a bit about network but I’m not a specialist.
I was wondering if there’s someone here that has experimented with such a configuration? Is it even possible to make that work?
Hi, welcome to the forum.
Why do you want to set up your network in this way? The way networks work is that when devices are connected, they can all see each other. The switch will efficiently send the data to the correct client, and a direct connection is not required.
Your Superuniti needs to see your internet connection, the NAS, and the server. Connecting it directly to the NAS means that it can see the NAS, but nothing else.
I would leave your network set up as previously. You could probably set up the SU and NAS on an isolated network but it in all honesty it’s not going to improve the sound quality one bit. Also it’s going to make using the Naim app and iRadio difficult if not impossible in some cases.
A network switch “learns” which devices are connected to each port. So it will only pass packets (in general) to the relevant devices once plugged in. If you want to get into managed L2 switches, VLANS and L3 switches you can do a lot of network segmentation, but it’s again probably not the right solution and unlikely to help here.
I have seen a Melco NAS on which the Streamer can be directly connected into without needing a switch and I wanted to experiment with that with my NAS. I thought that maybe with the network config of the DSM I could do it but it doesn’t seem to be doable and will probably not improve anything.
As robgr says the main issue is that your 272 needs an ip address and it won’t get one if you connect it directly to a NAS. That’s why the app can’t see the SuperUniti.
The way you had it connected initially is the right way.
The Melco is specifically designed to work like this through a dedicated Ethernet port for the streamer. As far as I’m aware you can’t do it with a regular NAS like your Synology.
To have a WiFi section on your network you have to have a WiFi Access Point (WAP), if you have a network consisting of just the NAS and the SU it has no WAP (the SU doesn’t have a WAP, just a WiFi endpoint) hence that network doesn’t have WiFi, even if your other network (with your router in i)t does have WiFi; so the two networks can’t join together.