I'll be adding an NDX to my system (282/HCDR/202/NDAC) in the coming week and am curious about any experiences with the following streaming options:
1) From a central computer (SSD for OS, music storage on HDDs, 32GB RAM) hooked into a home network/router, I would stream music wirelessly to a WiFi range extender (not wifi over powerlines) located in the music listening room. The extender would then be connected via ethernet cable to the NDX. So data goes from central CPU -> wifi router -> wifi extender -> ethernet cable -> NDX. This option is the most convenient currently and works flawlessly with an SB Touch (wifi signal is strong throughout the house).
2) Purchase a NAS, place it in the same room as the NDX, and use the recommended setup (separate switch, access point for wifi, ethernet cables). This would require purchasing a NAS....
Assuming that both options are stable and allow the use of recommended UPNP servers (Asset, Synology, etc.), my concern is whether sound quality should be considerably different between the two.
Thanks for any feedback. The regular contributors to this part of the forum have been extremely helpful to my decision making about the NDX -- greatly appreciated!
Regards,
M
Posted on: 18 February 2013 by rjstaines
The addition of a NAS drive to house your music files gives you robustness and a degree of future proofing, together (if you raid the NAS) with a degree of backup protection. With all your music on a NAS, you can pick & choose how you serve it and to what you serve it - the NDX being an excellent client, of course.
It's my experience that WIFI connections will sooner or later fail to provide sufficient throughput for music replay, most especially when you start to collect HD albums encoded at 192khz, so venturing down the hard-wired gigabit switch NAS route sooner rather than later will put you in a good place for future upgrades & expansion.
Posted on: 18 February 2013 by murkku
Wireless bridge/extender (eg. Airport Express) wired to NDX works beautifully, assuming you have fast enough wifi/lan setup. Hi-res files will run out of buffer & stutter, if the rest of the network can't keep up with NDX.
Posted on: 18 February 2013 by MMcCulloch
Thanks. Thus far, my wifi network hasn't encountered any issues when streaming 24/96 material to an SB Touch. A speed test app reports up/down transfers of approximately 30/Mbps while connected to the wifi bridge, which seems sufficient for streaming music. But time will tell....Glad to know that a wifi bridge -> ethernet connection isn't considered inferior from a sound quality perspective compared to a directly connected NAS (though I concur with the comments above regarding the advantages of backup protection and the like with a NAS). Any other experiences with this would be welcome.
Posted on: 18 February 2013 by SKDriver
My NDX is hardwired via an Airport Extreme used as a router, which itself is wired to the a BT Homehub (with wireless disabled). Hence the AEx acts as a wireless access point - cheaper options are available however (got mine used off fleabay; you don't need the latest 5th gen and there are loads available).
Asset UPnP is great and I use this on my laptop. I also have Synology diskstation NAS. The Synology software is really very good and allows transcoding of FLAC files to WAV 'on the fly'. It also has an inbuilt iTunes server if that flicks your switch...
Just make sure that everything has a fixed IP address and that it's wired by Cat5e as a minimum and it will work a treat. Enjoy the NDX - it's a fab bit of kit that has transformed how much and the way I listen to music.
