Ted, you mentioned in this or another thread that a NAS is inherently noisy. Have you tried a network isolator and, if so, does it improve things?
I haven’t tried one personally, they seem like a reasonable idea.
Power cables are the last ones for me to invest when system is already stable but with too much tries and errors to find out which ones can combine well with my gears in terms of impedance. The problem is they cost ridiculously to me and not like lots of audiophiles who can hear lots of things, my ears cannot hear out very tiny things with blind tests so in a practical way I gave up on them.
I found good speaker cables make lots of differences to me. Balanced cables (not necessary expensive ones) also make lots differences for me than expensive RCA ICs.
Thanks, Ted for the answers. My question one above has not been addressed but that’s fine. Just a confirmation question.
Why NAS is noisy? Do you only map network drives or do you stream via DLNA? I am using NAS/DLNA/Ethernet and cannot tell the difference with playing straight from SSD or CD. If you only map, Ethernet has no effect on audio (jitter stuff) anyway; it is all about the implementation of the music server, nothing to do with NAS. If you stream via DLNA, do you mean DLNA is not matured enough? I would think the streamers are responsible to buffer and clock data out and from that point on, audio quality can be defined by quality of the streamers. Even DLNA is not very ideal, streamers have to deal with that nicely and won’t let the streaming part affects the clocking out data to DAC. Just that the implementation of the specific music streamers are not good enough to make NAS work well with them and not enough to feed good data to DAC (buffering incoming data, clock, separated power, efficient software, efficient resource management, galvanization and isolation). I personally don’t think NAS is the one to blame in the chain. Good to hear good reasons on different ideas.
Most NASs are build to be fast, e.g. they use multiple fast drives. Fast drives make audible noise and to go fast they need big bursts of current. Those bursts of current are noise that the NAS puts on the power lines and noise that shows up on the output wires. Also most (but not all) NASs are optimized to be reliable and fast not to be electrically quiet, i.e. they are often built for business or industrial environments. Anyway that noise does cause jitter (which will get greatly attenuated both in the bridge and then again in the DS.) But it also can be radiated by the cables, etc. Different systems will react differently to these sources of noise. My system (which is fairly immune to many sources of noise) gets a hard edge to the sound when connected to the NAS by a network cable. I’m sure that if I used a longer cable, had more switches between the NAS and my system and/or had the NAS more remotely located the noise would lessen. But since I had other reasons to put the NAS on wireless I chose that as a way of isolating it. Don’t get me wrong, wireless is often a network reliability problem and obviously it’s an RF source, but 1 gig wireless doesn’t seem to be a reliability problem and like everything else it’s a compromise, but a compromise that works for me at this point in time.
I’m not trying to scare anyone away from NASs, it’s just that virtually anything has some downsides and being nice to a music system was the last thing on the minds of the designers for most NASs. (Tho that’s changing.) For many systems a NAS is can be better than a bunch of USB drives or a bunch of drives in the music computer proper.
Ted, would a better ps for the NAS help ?
Better power supplies hardly ever hurt, but high frequency hash is incredibly hard to suppress - it sails right thru transformers, most power supply caps don’t filter it, etc. Fast disk drives are great for lots of things but not necessarily for music servers 
Still most of us have our NAS’s remotely located from our music systems so with the extra filtering by going thru the Bridge and the physical distance from most of the NAS radiation many find the Bridge to be their best input.
Ted Smith said Most NASs are build to be fast, e.g. they use multiple fast drives. Fast drives make audible noise and to go fast they need big bursts of current. Those bursts of current are noise that the NAS puts on the power lines and noise that shows up on the output wires. Also most (but not all) NASs are optimized to be reliable and fast not to be electrically quiet, i.e. they are often built for business or industrial environments. Anyway that noise does cause jitter (which will get greatly attenuated both in the bridge and then again in the DS.) But it also can be radiated by the cables, etc. Different systems will react differently to these sources of noise. My system (which is fairly immune to many sources of noise) gets a hard edge to the sound when connected to the NAS by a network cable. I'm sure that if I used a longer cable, had more switches between the NAS and my system and/or had the NAS more remotely located the noise would lessen. But since I had other reasons to put the NAS on wireless I chose that as a way of isolating it. Don't get me wrong, wireless is often a network reliability problem and obviously it's an RF source, but 1 gig wireless doesn't seem to be a reliability problem and like everything else it's a compromise, but a compromise that works for me at this point in time.I’m not trying to scare anyone away from NASs, it’s just that virtually anything has some downsides and being nice to a music system was the last thing on the minds of the designers for most NASs. (Tho that’s changing.) For many systems a NAS is can be better than a bunch of USB drives or a bunch of drives in the music computer proper.
Interesting. Years ago I used NAS because conventional wisdom said was this is the superior approach. I had problems with some configuration and had to temporarily fall back to USB storage. When I switched back to NAS I found sound quality was worse. Have been using USB storage ever since. My new server will have 2TB of internal SSD - again a leap of faith this will take thinks up a small notch.
I’m still mot convinced about SSDs, but I feel like utilizing SATA was a better sounding option than USB. I’m currently using eSATA for my music files with a spinning drive. Does it sound better than having the drive in the case? I’m positively not sure about that. I guess that what I’m thinking is that the differences are not that great but there is no harm in trying.
I’m not convinced either, but SSD has become relatively affordable and I don’t want to risk leaving performance on the table. I’ll have 2 x SSD and 2 x spinning drive in the same server, so I could theoretically compare playing the same track from different drives, NAS, external USB etc. I probably won’t…
I definitely like SSD’s but their cost / TB is still prohibitive for my music collection. And given that I’d almost certainly need multiple drives they’d probably end up in a separate box anyway. They definitely produce less electrical noise than a typical spinning disk, but it’s a different character of noise and I don’t know if either one is definitely better or worse in an average system.
I have just 600 gB of 2 channel, and 1TB of MCH music, so I can make do with two drives at $400 a piece. Not cheap, but $800 spend on peace of obsessive compulsive audiophile mind.
I have thought of replacing my HD’s in my Lumin L1 NAS with SSD’s to get best best of two worlds.
http://www.luminmusic.com/lumin-l1.html
I have done this with my Synology.
If nothing else we are stimulating the economy.
Going to computer in particular and electronics in general, noise is everywhere. Noise goes to your power line, noise on the cables to your gear. Of course we cannot avoid them. NAS has noise, your SSD/HDD/CPU also has noise/radiation. Just the matter of implementation, which being the critical path which noise should be reduced and isolated. In therory, data from NAS goes down to music server RAM and read from there over bus to USB/output hardware with clocking out. Jitter starts from those hardware and they are the critical components to be shielded from noise.
It’s all about implementation of those gears. We want computer audio and we have to accept to use these advanced technologies rather than going back 10 years. Everything has pros and cons.
Even you try to avoid these all, your neighbor’s aircon or washing machines won’t be soft on you.
So for me, I would like to look into the gear I buy to see if it can do what and if it addresses the right audio-related technical challenges at right place rather than going with evasion treatment with high cost just to sleep well.
Some of the noise problems are true; some need to be solved at critical parts of the gears only. But some are exaggerated by people that they are everywhere like you can see viruses everywhere so they have to solved in every corner of the gear. They can be everywhere but the question is where they need to be shielded to achieve the real need. Just a matter of perception.
To be honest, when I went blind tests with my system with different combinations and all the time, the results disappointed me. So don’t let being subjective, pride of ownership to fool the way our minds work.
If you want a simple answer there are two: “Nothing makes a difference” or “Everything makes a difference”
The truth is that both are wrong. But the truth is much closer to the Everything side than most objectivists think and closer to Nothing than most subjectivists think.
^^^
Well said.
Ted … that’s expressed brilliantly.
That pearl could put a stop to all those useless subjectivist vs objectivist debates that plague many forums.
@tamnguyennb: I agree that concentrating efforts on critical spots is a good idea, but what are those spots as it relates to audio? My take is that it is basically up to us to do this. I doubt that there is an OEM out there that is designing computer or network hardware for audio at the level that we consider significant. It is likely that our concerns are not even considered valid in that industry. After all, what we are concerned about, at this point in “audio history”, is not or not yet measurable by conventional means. We have to listen to know whether an implemented idea has had an effect and that is subjective. I believe that we, as the collective computer audio community, will be the ones to figure out how to get digital equipment to do what we want, not the hardware producers themselves.
Ted Smith said If it works :) Whether such devices work depends not only on the DS, but on the specific HUBs, PS hardware, OS and drivers. It's worth trying: things like this work for some systems and not for others.ted a very interesting thing has come to light with my Directstream, I recently tried using my Krell connect to pull audio from my Jriver and send it to the directstream via toslink or coax ( the bridge is constantly crashing) and i discovered that my krell will pass dsd in dop format to the directstream via either the toslink or coax and if i set the jriver to not put dsd in dop the krell passes pcm to the directstream..I didnt think toslink was capable of passing over 96k? im attaching some photos and just would like your input as to what is actually occuring and if im correct r crazy