Why Does Radio Paradise Sound Much Better than Local Stored UPnP NAS

Just over a year ago I migrated my music files from an ageing Qnap to an Audiostore music server. I did this for three reasons:

  1. The Qnap was getting on, but I could repurpose it as backup;
  2. I use a MacBook to rip my CDs, and it was getting well past it’s best; and
  3. I wanted to Roonify my NDS.
    I had listened to other storage devices such as Naim Core, Moon, Innuous and Melco; but I was not impressed with their value for money. Hence I looked at the Audiostore solutions.
    When I made the move I noticed an improvement in sound quality and I had the added convenience of Roon.

I don’t know why but with my Nds/ Melco, I prefer slightly Flac vs Wav, despite that all are saying that Wav is sounding better, specially with the old streamers.
As for Radio Paradise, or Fip, which sound very good, I clearly prefer the sound of stored albums via Melco . Even if it’s not always night and day.

The FLAC codec is designed to make decoding easy in order to make it easy to implement in hardware. Encoding is computationally much more demanding and is based on the compression level chosen. The higher the compression level you select, the harder the encoder works to look for functions that approximate the signal. The functions used are themselves encoded in the FLAC file so that decoding only requires reading and then computing the encoding functions. This makes decoding time relatively constant regardless of the chosen compression level.

Naim chose WAV as the storage format for their rippers as it was known when the first gen streamers were designed that even though the FLAC decode overhead is low, adding those decode cycles on the computationally limited resources of those first gen streamers would generate load that would have an impact on sound quality.

Even a nine year old NAS certainly has more computational capacity than the first gen streamers, and FLAC decode is unlikely to present a challenging load on a QNAP TS-212. I wonder if @Mr.Frog has monitored CPU load on the QNAP when it is transcoding FLAC files?

While Mr.Frog has a newer ND5XS2 with the new streaming module, this might well still be on par with the 1.2Ghz Marvell SOC used in the QNAP. Even though the reported benefits of transcoding are much reduced with the newer streamers I’d still enable it as you really have nothing to lose.

Just to throw the cat amongst the pigeons, you might be aware that RP broadcasts a FLAC stream as well as 320k AAC and that the newer streamers can be configured to play the FLAC stream using vTuner. :slight_smile:

1 Like

This is likely to be it. There is a post by the station owner somewhere on the Radio Paradise forum to say that some judicious EQ is applied here and there.

I am doubtful that this applies, the ARM CPU in the QNAP has no dedicated hardware for decoding audio files, this means that everything is done in software which is very slow, mainly because older ARM CPU’s are relatively weak in floating point calculations.

The ND5XS2 will likely not decode a FLAC in software but rather has a computational unit which handles it, which would make it a lot less intensive to compute, in orders of several magnitudes.

There is Naim recommendations and our own preferences.
When I had the Naim Unitserve, I preferred Wav or AIFF.
But now, since I have the ER/ linear ps and Melco n1z/2, I prefer Flac. It gives me a bit more clarity and airiness. A little bit.

Mine is fed from the NAS via a Raspberry Pi 3 running Asset UPnP transcoding FLAC to WAV, and seems pretty good. Presumably a recent Pi is as up to the job as the current streamers are…

Does anyone else have info of RP’s processing of their streams? I was under the impression there was no added coloring but I can’t recall from where I read that.

Yes, htop shows average (over 5 minutes) CPU loads of less than 20% when transcoding a 24/192 file on a RPi 3 (1GB RAM) and of less than 5% on a RPi 4 (4 GB RAM). This is with MinimServer but I would expect Asset to yield similar figures.

This is the easy answer.

I find the idea of RP sounding better than locally streamed lossless files quite baffling, because for me, it has always been the exact opposite. As iRadio goes, RP is better than most, but still I only bother with it occasionally as background music. Fortunately all that has changed with the recent lossless FLAC streams that RP have released, and I would encourage anyone with a current Naim streamer to give it a try.

I find it very hard to believe that anyone would subjectively prefer RP 320 streams, as to me it just sounds dull (relatively speaking) and I can’t help thinking that there must be a problem with your local server setup.

If the Nas is set up correctly. IE, it’s not performing a task such as scanning your entire music collection while streaming, the Nas will be barely ticking over. No need to replace it.

Images of the resource monitor of the TS-112 I use.

Streaming Redbook WAV.

Streaming 24/96

Streaming anything.

Open the resource monitor, stream a few different formats and see what’s going on.

1 Like

Perhaps the op just likes what radio paradise is doing to the stream. Even on flac stream there certainly sounds like smoothing going on, it also sounds like it’s been volume matched and to be frank the station has a magic way of making everything sound the same and at the same pace.

1 Like

Perhaps you’re right :grinning:

Absolutely and he can easily check whether this is the case or not with a simple test. I would be very interested in his findings!

I think they do.

I also think I read somewhere that RP applies some equalization to the sound. I listen to the RP FLAC stream via roon and it sounds amazing… almost too good.

Has anyone noticed a change in RP stereo stage presentation with the regular Naim’s Choice AAC 44.1kHz 320kb/s service. (not FLAC)
This morning I hear a lot more left & right definition, maybe more 3D, maybe a touch more treble detail. I’ve not noticed it before & its very pleasant.

This topic was automatically closed 60 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.