I have a ND5 XS and for the most part it works just great.
I have a couple of 192/24 albums that consistently stream really badly, and I can't understand why.
Yesterday I downloaded Living by Jan Gunnar Hoff a solo piano jazz record ( fantastic record btw - got from hiresaudio.com) and listened to it all the way through without any buffer issues, I monitored the Buffer level for a while via the front panel and only the right most bar ever moved.
So then I put on Aretha Franklin Live at Fillmore ( purchased from HDTracks ) and got about 30 seconds in before it dropped out, I can see the buffer level falling steadily till it drops, then it shoots back up.
By my reckoning to serve up 192/24 stereo wav files should only take about 10Mbps of bandwidth, a flac file even less, so I'm not sure what is going on here.
It could be down to the complexity of the underlying material I guess, but I have a 192/24 version of Hotel California and that streams just fine.
Any ideas? I know there are different levels of FLAC compression, could it be that the Aretha files are compressed to a level that the CPU in the ND5 XS can't cope with in real time?
Posted on: 15 March 2013 by PinkHamster
I really have no clue what causes the problem but you could try the following:
Reconvert the album to new flac files with a high compression setting. If this streams w/o buffering issues, there is something fishy with the HDTracks files.
If there is still a buffering issue, reconvert to new flac files with a medium to low compression setting. If this solves the problem, there is likely something wrong with the network player.
High compression levels on flac files require relatively high CPU loads on encoding compared to lower compression levels. On decoding however the CPU loads hardly differ.
Posted on: 16 March 2013 by Simon-in-Suffolk
You don't mention what is serving these files.. I would look there first.. 192/24 although trivial for a standard 100Mbps LAN is more of a demand for a lower spec NAS or uPNP server.
If all ok, them I would transcode to WAV as rca/sun says. Although I see it less now the downside with FLAC is that some encodings can stall on playback . I do transcode or if neccessary re encode the FLAC to remove these issues if it becomes troublesome. But check your upnp/NAS bandwidth first.
Simon
Posted on: 16 March 2013 by lennieh
I'm using a vortexbox for my nas. I tried converting to wav files and the performance was about the same, I then converted back to level 5 flac and it seems to be working now though the buffer is about 60% full most of the time... Weird
Posted on: 16 March 2013 by Slioch
You don't say how you are connecting the ND5XS to the server....wired or wireless.
On 192/24 material I found that wireless (notionally running at ~75Mb/s according to the diagnostics) would work some times and not at others - it could work for a few days and then would show the buffer behaviour that you describe. Some tracks were more problematic than others - though I suspect I couldn't prove that. Looking at how the bandwidth on wireless behaved over a few days showed that it really varied (more than an order of magnitude) sometimes over quite short periods... I was never sure if that variation was caused by the streaming load or interference in the wifi from neighbours.
Moving to fully wired just let it work all the time. [And proved that it wasn't capacity at either the NAS or the streamer or the switch]
Posted on: 18 March 2013 by lennieh
Network issues probably. I tried wireless and wired (via a Powerline - I know - they are bad but I had hoped the technology had moved on somewhat).
I put the Vortexbox in the same room on the same network switch and all is good. It's less tha ideal having the NAS in the same room but will do until I get the dosh together to wire up properly.
I still think there is something odd about the material though. It doesn;t make sense that the 192/24 version of Hotel California consistently streams just fine, but two particular albums I go from HDTracks don't ( Aretha Live at Fillmore and Hey Jude by Wilson Pickett).
Will maybe stump up for a better wireless router ( I've got a BT HomeHub3 just now that they supplied when we upgraded to Infinity), but it actually seems worse than the HH2 we had before)
Thanks for your thoughts guys.
