That’s a completely different situation from the one discussed by the OP, though.
I understand that the OP is finding that Asset and MinimServer sound differenty when they run on the same computing platform and with the same network and renderer setup.
That the same UPnP server can sounds slightly differently on different computing platform is a fact that has been investigated and reported in this forum, by the way.
Thus, it is also conceivable that, on a given platform, Asset sounds better than MinimServer and, on another computing platform, the other way round.
I would expect such differences to be negligible, however. Thus, I find the findings reported by the OP a bit surprising and therefore interesting.
Yes absolutely… I undertook quite some analysis a few years ago and I determined the causes that resulted in difference in SQ on UPnP playback.
I shared my findings with Naim whilst they were developing the newer streamers. The streaming spooling method in the new devices is now totally different, and the differences are not apparent to me now.
My favourite sounding UPnP media server was rather surprising… and in measurement did have an indeed rather specific signature.
BTW the differences are NOT specifically caused by media server software itself such as Asset, Mi imserver etc…
In summary I found a correlation between the inter frame timing consistency on the ethernet and the sound signature on the legacy streamer. The more consistent the spacing between the frames, during the media transfer, the more I seem to prefer the sound. The greater the variation the less i found the sound appealing.
This led to experiment further and I discovered the benefit of the internet streaming proxy media server with services like Tidal - it seemed to vey much improve the sound as it made the inter frame timimg look and sound like it was being locally streamed.
The timing consistency seemed to be a product of the hardware, operating system and to some extent the application working together.
The most consistent timing I found was from a Netgear RN102 running its internal DLNA server - and that sounded the most preferable on my system over the other platforms and other applications.
I created some wireshark macros to explore this further. Look at the red line which is the minimum time between frames in media transfer bursts
Hi Simon, Could you make these macros available, as I would be interested in measuring this, in particular Asset on a RPi2 with a very leanOS and the ‘bridged’ UPnP output from the SonoreUPnP bridge product feeding my NDS/555DR from a ROCK based NUC.
Thanks
You ideally should configure and use a SPAN port on a managed switch such as a 2960 or similar that is monitoring the switch port to your streamer and feed the SPAN data into a dedicated monitor interface with no other traffic. I use a separate USB ethernet interface on my iMac which I configure Wireshark to monitor. That way you are are relatively close as you can be to the actual frame timings
Hmm - I wouldn’t normally post such things here - but Mr Pepper did request - so excuse the rabbit hole…
But in summary: The best SQ was attributed (by a few listeners inc myself) to the media server that had the smallest interval between media frames during a media transfer burst… this method of spooling was changed with the new generation streamers and the effect is now not apparent to me and at the time Naim engineering design were fairly confident my observations would not be so relevant with the new generation streamers. The instrument under test was an NDX.
Indeed, as interesting as it might be as to why, the question is a bit simpler - do they sound different & on/with what.
@nbpf post above sums it up … "I understand that the OP is finding that Asset and MinimServer sound differenty when they run on the same computing platform and with the same network and renderer setup.
That the same UPnP server can sounds slightly differently on different computing platform is a fact that has been investigated and reported in this forum, by the way.
Thus, it is also conceivable that, on a given platform, Asset sounds better than MinimServer and, on another computing platform, the other way round."
Thanks - unfortunately the 5-port switch I use for my ‘front-end’ HiFi componets is an unmanaged Cisco SG100D-05 model, so no method of port mirroring. I do have an 8-port and 5-port Netgear Managed switches in the backend, but that’s a sub-network away in terms of isolating the traffic between streamer and the UPnP server/provider.
So will have some network re-configuring to do, if I want to ‘watch the wire’ going into the streamer.
Getting back on thread subject:
Last weekend I installed Minimserver/Java/M.Watch & had a more serious listen over two evenings to compare with Asset ( R6.3 beta).
iPad, Synology DS214, ethernet via switch to NDX, playing WAV 16+24bit & DSD64, electric rock, acoustic folk, jazz, small ensemble & full orchestra.
This confirmed again that there is very little to choose thats different in sound terms.
Operation, ease of use, configuration etc., I found Asset so much easier, but to be fair I’ve put that down to familiarity.
I have not found anything that persuades me to change from Asset.
Maybe a different NAS model or brand with different CPU, OS or RAM will show up something different.
A month back I had Asset, Minim, Linn Kazoo Server and Twonky installed on a Debian Linux mini-ITX.
Using tunedem-tests I preferred Twonky (8.5.1) using .WAV-files with ID3-tags. But the differences was not that large and most notable with orchestral harmonies (like Wagner). Up to then I had been running Minim.
I have both Asset 6.2 and latest Minimserver installed to my low cpu power 119+ QNAP. I have not compared them because i have all my files in FLAC and Asset plays them as WAV but Minim as FLAC.
I know Minim can play WAV too but i have not configured it yet. Do i need install other packages to QNAP in order to do so?
I am trying right now to configure this on QNAP via command line. I have managed so far to install static version of ffmpeg program in the appropriate directory/share/HDA_DATA/.qpkg/MinimServer/opt/bin]
Now remains (i think) to find where i put flac:wav option…
