Enjoying streaming but...

Posted by: DomTomLondon on 26 October 2013

Last year I bought a unitiQute and a pair of KEF R100s for my open plan kitchen/lounge. The sound quality is great, I love the way the Qute just makes music fun to listen to and the nStream app is easy to use. I stream all my albums in flac from a Synology NAS running it's own server media software. And also enjoy FM, and iRadio, especially the 320k radio paradise stream.

 

Everything is great when it works, but occasionally, and it's been happening more recently, the music files will not play. The server is working fine and is recognised by the Qute and the nStream app. I can browse my music library and choose an album, but when I hit play one track or play all, it does nothing, and the Qute display just says 'press play to reconnect', but when I do it still does not respond. It is very annoying, and the only way I found to fix this is to power down the Qute for a few minutes.

 

I've become so frustrated that I am thinking of selling the Qute and buying a Nait SX and use my Audiolab CD8200 as DAC from the iMac which sits in the lounge as well. using Audirvana/iTunes and the apple remote for browsing my albums

 

Have others had issues like this with streaming? Would the Audiolab/Nait SX still give me the naim sound I've come to enjoy?

Posted on: 23 December 2013 by Madrid
Originally Posted by Simon-in-Suffolk:

 

All I can say if you are running out of media then your NAS most likely does not have the throughput. A 192/24 stream requires just under 10Mbps throughput from your disc drive(s) on your NAS, which these days is not too demanding.

 

Simon

How can one measure the throughput from the NAS to see whether it is sufficient?

Posted on: 23 December 2013 by Phil Harris
Originally Posted by Madrid:
Originally Posted by Simon-in-Suffolk:

 

All I can say if you are running out of media then your NAS most likely does not have the throughput. A 192/24 stream requires just under 10Mbps throughput from your disc drive(s) on your NAS, which these days is not too demanding.

 

Simon

How can one measure the throughput from the NAS to see whether it is sufficient?

 

That's a little difficult as it depends on the speed of your network, the speed of the NAS hardware and the speed of the NAS accessing the drives in the NAS - all of which can have an impactt.

 

Streaming a 192kHz 24bit audio file requites 24 x 192,000 x 2 bits of audio data per second (just over a megabyte) which is within the remit of everything that we've tried but generally we've found that NASs from NetGear (the ReadyNAS range) and the QNAPs have been reliable enough.

 

Cheers

 

Phil