Synology NAS Attack

My 2 cents worth  ..........  After some careful listening Mrs Mike & I both agreed WAV to be better than the transcoded FLAC-WAV.  I knew which codec was playing,  Mrs Mike didn't. 

WAV has a pinch of mellow sweetness over FLAC.

Also I notice a straight 24/96 WAV plays at 4608kbps whereas transcoded FLAC is a a lower, can't remember but its 3700-something. I'm not sure why, anyone know ??? is it carrying thru the compression which is set default at #5 which I believe is 35%. 

And can someone explain the purpose of the re-indexing function 

@Mike-B: When transcoding flac or alac to wav, Synology truncates  24bit to 16bit while keeping sample rate as the original.

Thanks Dambor,  do you know if that's the same for all NAS units or is a Synology thing.

If it is Synology only its something to keep in mind with the transcoding debates - which I am sure, like the many cable debates, will return from time to time. 

It just makes me even more convinced to stick with WAV for my 24bit music

It's just a Synology Media Server thing (software, not hardware), no a NAS one. I use JRiver in my iMac to stream flac & alac files transcoded to wav from my Synology NAS and it works perfectly. You could use another media server software in your Synology NAS such as minimserver and it will transcode files to wav perfectly. I don't use it because it's a pain in the neck to install/set up and the user interface is very basic, but there are plenty of people happy with it in this forum.

You can turn off scanning, but only at a shared folder level, not below that. I have 4 shared folders: Music, Photo, Video and Data, I only scan the Music share.

I can't say I hear the difference between FLAC and WAV and would probably fail in blind listening tests, but I noticed that with WAVs I can listen to the music longer and a bit louder without fatigue, at least on some material. That made me go for the solution when the Synology transcodes the FLACs to WAVs. With DSM 4.3 that was not possible with hi-res files, so I thought of installing a Minimserver or some such solution, but I don't like using additional software if I don't have to - plain vanilla systems perform better and there are less elements to troubleshoot So I'm very glad DSM 5 fixed that and now every file transcodes properly to WAV, even 24/192 files.

It's a pity DSD files don't get natively played on ND5XS, though. My little Fio X5 player apparently can play them, which I can't test, unfortunately, because I've sent my entire SACD collection to a guy who has a PlayStation and converts them to WAV or FLAC for a small fee - I haven't asked for ISO images and it's all PCM (FLACs) now, unless I send it to him again, which is a hassle and additional cost.

Hi Gajdzin,

Thanks again. I too have the same shared folders, so I will make to change to only scan the Music share.

I'll also play around with the FLAC/WAV transcoding although not sure I will use it. Interesting that while Naim recommends streaming WAV rather than FLAC, Linn seem quite happy to promote the use of FLAC. No one on the Linn forums appear to have noticed any difference.

Yes - it is a pity about Naim's inability to cope with DSD files. Some initial tests I carried out with my Hugo and JRiver using DSD were remarkably promising. However, as things stand, it's both to cumbersome (and expensive) for me to go down the DSD route in any meaningful way.

Incidentally, I do have a Playstation 3 (originally bought primarily as a Blu-ray player) that I haven't used for quite a few years, so I guess I could rip my few SACD discs if I could be bothered to work out how to do this.  

You need a playstation with a specific firmware version number range, from the early production. These show up on a popular auction site, but when I looked at the price and the number of installation steps needed to get it all to work (you can google several how-to articles), I gave up and instead used a service, an ad I found on a local site transfers everything to everything, like old 8mm videos to DVD, and also SACD to FLACs. I sent the guy my disks and a pen drive and a week later he sent them all back with the FLACs on the pen drive. I asked for 24-88.2 FLACs, because I can't hear any difference between those and higher sampling frequencies, and they occupy less space on my Synology NAS. This was an encouraging experience and now I'm hunting for more 2nd hand SACDs on my local auction site, they are often cheaper than CDs, because few people have the equipment to play them!

One caveat I found the hard way: some SACDs turned out to only have the CD layer and e.g. a 5.1 mix, no stereo mix in hi-res. The Dark Side of the Moon was like that. I did try to down-mix it to 2 channels in my home recording studio using Cockos Reaper, but the results are not as a good as a regular CD - I just don't have the right skills, all my life I've been mixing in stereo only...