Quiet music server solution

Synology is probably the best all around home NAS. I have a 8 bay HDD one and use it for Time Capsule, media, file server, uPNP and a bunch of other stuff. The software is very intuitive and extensible, you can load 3rd party servers etc on it. The one to get for your use case is probably DS414 slim as it is made for 2.5" Drives. They have a compatibility list, if you want redundancy it is basically going to have 3/4 usable so if you needed around 3 TB you would install 4 1TB SSD's. They have a compatibility table, you just buy the drives from whoever you want, there is no lock-in. It is a very flexible device.

Erlend, it's hard to say, as it depends on your tolerance for sound.  All hard drives make some sound.

I recently bought a QNAP HS-251, which they call "silent and fanless."  It has no fan.  The nas itself is silent (because it has no fan).  But the WD Red hard drives in it are not silent, and I can hear the discs 'clunking' around a bit from across the room when the room is silent. (I cannot hear them over the music.)

So I think that nothing with a traditional hard drive in it is TRULY silent -- just depends on your wants and needs.  I would need to go to too-expensive solid-state drives to get true silence.

(I have a Synology too, with a fan.  When the room is quiet you'll hear it too.)

Hi Erland -

If you are happy with the laptop noise level but unhappy with your external drive, going over to a NAS for your external storage is easy. If you can put the NAS away somewhere else - eg in the room or basement where your router lives - then you can have a normal one with a fan and spinning drives, but you won't hear it in your music room anyway. You would just mount these network drives on your Mac and keep all other functionality of your music serving as it is now. You could possibly try this out now by putting a drive (even a USB memory key) on your router - most have this capability - and working out the logistics. Adding a bigger drive there first (an external USB drive, or perhaps your existing FireWire drive if it also has a USB connection) is easy, and you could test to see if read/write speed troubles you and switch over to a NAS afterward if necessary. 

For or local silent operation, your best bet is an SSD, but that's pricey for the size of storage you're looking at...

My main suggestion is to think a bit outside the box for drive placement, give it a try on the cheap to see if it works for you, then switch over for your full solution. 

Regards alan

Most regular NASs make some noise from the HDD and fan. You can get quieter options using SDD, near-silent fans or even no fan at all in some. Isolating them from the shelf they're on helps too - putting mine on a mouse mat made a big difference. Or, of course, keep it away from the streamer altogether. 

It all depends on your budget, room layout and tolerance for the noise. 

Mine is a regular Synology DS214 with WD Red's,  the Syn spec sheet claims it to be 17dB,  but no indication of 17dB at what distance.

Whatever, it runs in the listening room inside a closed cabinet & apart from starting up from off when a few clicks are heard for a few seconds, its effective silent.  Its supplied with soft rubber mounting feet,  but I have it standing on soft sorbothane half ball feet,  this is really effective & reduces the start-up noise so much that is now only be heard with the cabinet door open.   I think the NAS of old were a noisy, but from what I can read & hear,  modern ones are a lot closer to silent during music play.  

Why not just get it out of the room altogether?

There is no need to keep it close by. Just use a long(er) cat-cable.

Only fanless servers and SSD drives in the music room! I would follow Wat's advice. If you are not comfortable with OS X and you know how to setup a Linux server, a fanless fit-PC (fit-PC4 or Fitlet) are fine. You should be able to connect up to 6 SSD to a fit-PC4. I use a fit-PC3 with a small internal SSD drive and a single 1TB SSD external drive. The price for 1TB SSD has dropped to about 400 EUR. Alternatively, you can move your 4TB drive out of the room and connect it to a Raspberry Pi running the UPnP sever of your choice. In this case you most likely will need a wired connection to the network player (a mac mini or otherwise) in the music room. Best, nbpf

That seems the most obvious and simple solution.

Me:

NAS, PC, Router, Switch (office)

<cable>

SuperUniti, PMC twenty.22 (listening room)

No noise other than I can hear birds having dust baths in the galvanised guttering. Keeping the hifi and PC stuff electrically 'distanced' helps minimise the polluting effects of RFI.

Thanks for all input and advices!

I am going to try out some of your suggestion to see if they'll work for me.

I already tried Audirvana and liked it better than BitPefect sonically.

I just haven't gotten around to buying the license yet.

For the sake of ease-of-use I am also considering switching to a hard drive player solution like UnitiServe or a similar solution from other brands. I think VortexBox is one such solution.

Does anyone have any experience or opinions on what would work best with my DAC-V1?

If you're still considering a Unitiserve, I can vouch for it as an excellent ripping and storage device for UPnP streaming, and local playback into a DAC. Mine is silent except when actually ripping a CD, or at least quiet enough that I've never noticed it while listening.

BUT from your point of view, there are probably a few things that might make you think twice:-

You're already set up for ripping on a Mac, so although the US may make it a little more convenient, you might be happy to carry on ripping the way you are now.

I don't think the current US will be able to play your 24/352.8 files.

It's expensive.....but you already know that!

If none of those issues stand in your way, it's a great solution, but a decent NAS at a fraction of the price might give you the same, or comparable, sound quality for a fraction of the price - and if you can instal a long Ethernet cable, as others have said, noise won't matter if you can site it out of the way.

I use a Vortexbox as a server via a UQ, but not as a direct player into my V1. I do know they make so called audiophile versions with better spdif output, so best to check that out (and probably still a third of the price of a US).

The cable can make a huge difference. I run a UQ1 as a digital out only, and while it sounded fine with a Chord Prodac, it wasn't that much better than just the UQ itself. Jumped up to a deal I found on an Atlas Opus cable (which Atlas re-teriminated to BNC for me for only shipping charges) and it was like, oh, that's what the V1 is supposed to sound like! Superb.

I also found the auto ripper in the Vortexbox to be slow, so I now rip via dbpoweramp on my macbook and it's a LOT faster. You should also be comfortable with the possibility on occasion of being able to log into the VB (USB keyboard and monitor needed) in order to do a bit of maintenance or troubleshooting. Not as difficult as it sounds, and usually a lot better than having to send it back to Naim in the case of the US. Of course others have probably never needed to, but we had buggy internet for awhile so the VB kept dropping out, but it was easy to just log in and fix what was needed. The one I have from Solid Green Computer in the States is fanless, though I leave it in a closet directly underneath the living room hifi kit and connect via a length of Audioquest Cinnamon Cat 7 via a couple of switches that are powered by a small linear power supply. The VB itself has a supposedly better shielded smps that I picked up from Hong Kong, from a company called Indeed Hifi (on that big auction site). No idea if it's any better really, but for $20 thought I'd give it a try. 

Best of luck. I love the V1 despite all the Hugo claims. It's a robust untit that just keeps sounding better and better (def give it a month or two to break in). 

What are you exactly looking for ? A ripping station ? A UPnP server (but then you would need a UPnP client -- something like an Auralic Aries or a Sonore Signature Rendu to feed the V1) ? A music server to connect via USB with your V1 ? All of these together ?

If you are looking for a microserver to connect your V1 via USB to and you are comfortable with OS X,  a mac mini running Audirvana -- as suggested by WAT -- is probably your best choice. You just would have to make sure that the system can access remote data (e.g., stored in your 4TB drive attached to some other machine on your LAN but out of the music room) and play from memory which Wat's post seems to suggest. You could easily test this solution with your MacBook at zero costs and only buy a mac mini if you are happy with it.

The advice is a bit all over the map here.

You currently use the Dac V1 as intended -- as a usb dac.  All that it seems that you really need is quieter mass storage of files for your Mac. 

A music server isn't a great solution for you, as you don't own a music player to put at the other end of it.  The Dac-V1 is not a UPnP streamer/player.  And a UnitiServe or VortexBox or the like would just duplicate what you seem to be doing just fine with your Mac.

I would simply stay in the same direction you're going in -- find a quieter external mass storage device to connect to your Mac, either directly (just an external usb drive) or over your home network (a nas).  You can put your iTunes library on the external device, and if it's a nas you can put it somewhere else in your home which by definition will make it quieter as it's not in your music room

For a Mac mini solution would it be necessary to swap out the internal HDD for a SSD?  Or would an external SSD for the music provide adequate results?

The Mini works perfectly well [and very much more quietly than a CD player for example] with its standard Hard Drive. No need for an SSD or even an external drive for music.

ATB from George

I don't think that you want to spend the money it takes to store all of that music on ssd's.  A standard Mac Mini, with an external hdd (usb or nas) would be just fine.  If the external drives are quiet enough.  And if the Mac Mini is quiet enough (I suspect it is).

Mac Mini is silent, new Mac Mini has no fan and if it has a SSD it has zero moving parts. However, you are still going to have to have some kind of NAS or disk shelf if you want to have any sizable amount of storage. The biggest SSD's are 1TB, so if you have a large library you are going to need multiple disks if you want to do silent solid state drives. certainly you can chain that off the Mac if you wish or use a NAS. If you just want to chain a drive off OWC has great mac drive enclosures http://eshop.macsales.com/shop...nderBay-4-mini-RAID5

You can put 4 sad's in this and it would be totally silent.

Wat's right -- I said 'usb' but with Mac, Thunderbolt is the preferred direct connection.

I'm sure that I'll eventually have ssd's for my music storage, but at $400 + for a 1TB drive . . . still too pricey for me (and my nas is a 2-bay enclosure and 2TB total isn't enough).

If all you're looking for is quieter storage, you could get a dual 2.5" USB 3 fan-less enclosure. And drop two 1TB SSDs inside. or have a look at regular 2.5" drives. 4200rpm ones are a lot quieter because they spin slower, but for music files, will be plenty fast. You can probably get two 2TB drives and an enclosure for under £200. That's a big difference compared to the UnitiServe which is over £2000.

Also I believe Qnap has a media NAS which is fan-less. If you place two 2.5" slow drives in, you should not hear them spinning at all, especially if you place the NAS away in a cupboard, or as suggested in another room. You can then still use your MacBook Pro as the player, but the storage will be on the network rather than directly attached.

I have that QNAP Nas; you don't hear the drives spinning, but you hear them 'clunking' as they read/write.  (WD Red drives.)  It's not all that loud, but when the room is quiet I hear it from across the room.

I have the QNAP HS 212 x2 TB Red drives, (use Asset) its very very quiet - and very happy with it, sits under the system directly wired into NDX

SSDs are getting bigger all of the time. The biggest seems to currently be 1600 GB.

Both of my Snologoy NAS' are silent. Both have WD REDs and sit next to Sky boxes.

I hear the disk in both Sky boxes spin up and also hear the normal PC drives and fans ( but I do have five fans )..

In my experience it is the fan in NAS (and plurality in many computers) that is an issue, seriously so with some classical music with very quiet passages, though maybe once that is gone, whether fanless NAS or Mac Mini etc, perhaps the clicking or whirring of the HD would then irritate.  Whilst moving NAS out of the listening room might be a good solution for some, it may not work in all cases because it still puts the noise somewhere, which may irritate other people. My own NAS is annoyingly noisy if there isn't music playing, as well as when music is quiet, so overall is actually least irritating in the listening room! Typical of things with fans it has gradually got noisier, despite occasional cleaning, and its days are now numbered, so I will be going for a fanless solution.

If noise of the HD is an issue, but capacity or cost of SSD is limiting, how about combining SSD and HD? e.g. saving music selectively, choosing SSD for music where the noise is more of a distraction, e.g with very quiet passages, and HD for remainder. And HD should be fine for backup as that need not be running when listening.

Originally Posted by DUPREE:

Is this true? Apple website doesn't say (current models) but states that it's quiescent noise level at the operator's position is 12dB, so there's something making a noise that's not the hard disk, which suggests a fan, albeit a reasonably quiet one. could anyone confirm with certainty whether any versions of Mac Mini are indeed fanless and truly silent if SSD? 

12dB is not very loud, but if there's an option of less then good to choose it...

The current Mac mini does certainly have a fan, although it is very quiet. I bought the basic one a couple of months ago. For confirmation type "late 2014 Mac mini tear down" into Google, or checkout this link if the moderators allow it:

https://www.ifixit.com/Teardow...+2014+Teardown/30410

The fan is the first thing out! The video says the fan is updated and uses advanced hydraulic bearing technology which allows the fan to operate quieter. I am not currently using mine for audio, but am never aware of the fan even though it is right in front of me on the desk. If I put my ear closer though I can hear some mechanical noise. It is way quieter than my previous crappy PCs so I can understand that someone might think that there is no fan.