Choice of Streamer (Synology vs. home pc).

Posted by: MangoMonkey on 17 March 2012

Never thought I'll see something like this: I decided to put my music up on the Synology NAS. Seeing an interesting phenomena:

 

When I stream from my PC music sounds nice and open.
When I stream it from teh NAS, it sounds compressed.

 

In both cases, I've got the system to convert it to wav on the fly.

 

The PC is a quad code hyperthreaded machine running asset.

 

The synology Nas is the small business one (one up from home): 1.6 GHz processor, with 256MB DDR3 ram.

 

When music streams through the PC, the music just feels more relaxed, like the noise floor has gone down.

Posted on: 17 March 2012 by MangoMonkey

Interesting:

 

My PC to NAS give me a throughput of 50000 KB/s when I'm copying files up or down from it. Here it is limited by Disk IO, I suspect.

 

When I stream music down, it never needs to exceed 400KB/S.

 

RAM is solidly down, so is CPU. These things shouldn't matter.

 

When I convert the music into Wav files and play these, the difference between the nas and the pc shrinks down.

 

I guess the issue is that dbasset isn't running on the NAS that's the issue.

Posted on: 17 March 2012 by MangoMonkey

What upnp server do people use with synology?

Posted on: 17 March 2012 by Rich27

The one that is built into the Synology software, is that not what you are using now?

Posted on: 17 March 2012 by MangoMonkey

That's what I am using. I just have a feeling that the dbAsset on my PC sounds better. It's just a feeling probably.